Related papers: The difficulty of beating the Taxman
This paper aims to solve the optimal strategy against a well-known adaptive algorithm, the Hedge algorithm, in a finitely repeated $2\times 2$ zero-sum game. In the literature, related theoretical results are very rare. To this end, we make…
Properties of graphs that can be characterized by the spectrum of the adjacency matrix of the graph have been studied systematically recently. Motivated by the complexity of these properties, we show that there are such properties for which…
The determination of the computational complexity of multi-agent pathfinding on directed graphs has been an open problem for many years. For undirected graphs, solvability can be decided in polynomial time, as has been shown already in the…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…
We show that the problem of checking if a given nondeterministic parity automaton simulates another given nondeterministic parity automaton is NP-hard. We then adapt the techniques used for this result to show that the problem of checking…
Winning probabilities of The Hat Game (Ebert's Hat Problem) with three players and three colors are only known in the symmetric case: all probabilities of the colors are equal. This paper solves the asymmetric case: probabilities may be…
Usually, to apply game-theoretic methods, we must specify utilities precisely, and we run the risk that the solutions we compute are not robust to errors in this specification. Ordinal games provide an attractive alternative: they require…
We propose a parametric specification of the probability of tax penalisation faced by a taxpayer, based on the amount of deduction chosen by her to reduce total taxation. Comparative analyses lead to a closed-form solution for the optimum…
The maximum matching width is a graph width parameter that is defined on a branch-decomposition over the vertex set of a graph. In this short paper, we prove that the problem of computing the maximum matching width is NP-hard.
Many puzzle video games, like Sokoban, involve moving some agent in a maze. The reachable locations are usually apparent for a human player, and the difficulty of the game is mainly related to performing actions on objects, such as pushing…
Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…
Many exact search algorithms for NP-hard graph problems adopt the old Davis-Putman branch-and-reduce paradigm. The performance of these algorithms often suffers from the increasing number of graph modifications, such as vertex/edge…
We present an effective heuristic for the Steiner Problem in Graphs. Its main elements are a multistart algorithm coupled with aggressive combination of elite solutions, both leveraging recently-proposed fast local searches. We also propose…
In recent work of Hazan and Krauthgamer (SICOMP 2011), it was shown that finding an $\eps$-approximate Nash equilibrium with near-optimal value in a two-player game is as hard as finding a hidden clique of size $O(\log n)$ in the random…
We introduce a game on graphs. By a theorem of Zermelo, each instance of the game on a finite graph is determined. While the general decision problem on which player has a winning strategy in a given instance of the game is unsolved, we…
We study the token swapping problem, in which we are given a graph with an initial assignment of one distinct token to each vertex, and a final desired assignment (again with one token per vertex). The goal is to find the minimum length…
We revisit the coalition structure generation problem in which the goal is to partition the players into exhaustive and disjoint coalitions so as to maximize the social welfare. One of our key results is a general polynomial-time algorithm…
Given a graph, the general problem to cover the maximum number of vertices by a collection of vertex-disjoint long paths seemingly escapes from the literature. A path containing at least $k$ vertices is considered long. When $k \le 3$, the…
We investigate the difficulty of finding economically efficient solutions to coordination problems on graphs. Our work focuses on two forms of coordination problem: pure-coordination games and anti-coordination games. We consider three…
This paper considers pairs of optimization problems that are defined from a single input and for which it is desired to find a good approximation to either one of the problems. In many instances, it is possible to efficiently find an…