The Computational Complexity of Single-Player Imperfect-Recall Games

The Computational Complexity of Single-Player Imperfect-Recall Games

Emanuel Tewolde, Caspar Oesterheld, Vincent Conitzer, Paul W. Goldberg

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2878-2887. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/321

We study single-player extensive-form games with imperfect recall, such as the Sleeping Beauty problem or the Absentminded Driver game. For such games, two natural equilibrium concepts have been proposed as alternative solution concepts to ex-ante optimality. One equilibrium concept uses generalized double halving (GDH) as a belief system and evidential decision theory (EDT), and another one uses generalized thirding (GT) as a belief system and causal decision theory (CDT). Our findings relate those three solution concepts of a game to solution concepts of a polynomial maximization problem: global optima, optimal points with respect to subsets of variables and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) points. Based on these correspondences, we are able to settle various complexity-theoretic questions on the computation of such strategies. For ex-ante optimality and (EDT,GDH)-equilibria, we obtain NP-hardness and inapproximability, and for (CDT,GT)-equilibria we obtain CLS-completeness results.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Noncooperative games
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Decision and utility theory
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Other
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Computational complexity of reasoning