May 2, 2016

Benjamin Monmege (LIF Marseille)

Quantitative games are two-player zero-sum games played on directed weighted graphs. Total-payoff games—that can be seen as a refinement of the well-studied mean-payoff games—are the variant where the payoff of a play is computed as the sum of the weights. In this talk, I will describe the first pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for total-payoff games in the presence of arbitrary weights. It consists of a non-trivial application of the value iteration paradigm. Indeed, it requires to study, as a milestone, a refinement of these games, called min-cost reachability games, where we add a reachability objective to one of the players. For these games, we give an efficient value iteration algorithm to compute the values and optimal strategies (when they exist), that runs in pseudo-polynomial time. I will also present heuristics able to speed up the computations. Joint work with Thomas Brihaye, Gilles Geeraerts, and Axel Haddad.