First-cycle games

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Publication:528186

DOI10.1016/J.IC.2016.10.008zbMATH Open1371.91019arXiv1404.0843OpenAlexW2963607100WikidataQ58105341 ScholiaQ58105341MaRDI QIDQ528186FDOQ528186

Sasha Rubin, Benjamin Aminof

Publication date: 12 May 2017

Published in: Information and Computation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: First cycle games (FCG) are played on a finite graph by two players who push a token along the edges until a vertex is repeated, and a simple cycle is formed. The winner is determined by some fixed property Y of the sequence of labels of the edges (or nodes) forming this cycle. These games are traditionally of interest because of their connection with infinite-duration games such as parity and mean-payoff games. We study the memory requirements for winning strategies of FCGs and certain associated infinite duration games. We exhibit a simple FCG that is not memoryless determined (this corrects a mistake in it Memoryless determinacy of parity and mean payoff games: a simple proof by Bj"orklund, Sandberg, Vorobyov (2004) that claims that FCGs for which Y is closed under cyclic permutations are memoryless determined). We show that /Theta(n)! memory (where n is the number of nodes in the graph), which is always sufficient, may be necessary to win some FCGs. On the other hand, we identify easy to check conditions on Y (i.e., Y is closed under cyclic permutations, and both Y and its complement are closed under concatenation) that are sufficient to ensure that the corresponding FCGs and their associated infinite duration games are memoryless determined. We demonstrate that many games considered in the literature, such as mean-payoff, parity, energy, etc., satisfy these conditions. On the complexity side, we show (for efficiently computable Y) that while solving FCGs is in PSPACE, solving some families of FCGs is PSPACE-hard.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0843




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