Half-Positional Objectives Recognized by Deterministic Büchi Automata (Extended Abstract)

Half-Positional Objectives Recognized by Deterministic Büchi Automata (Extended Abstract)

Patricia Bouyer, Antonio Casares, Mickael Randour, Pierre Vandenhove

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sister Conferences Best Papers. Pages 6420-6425. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/713

In two-player zero-sum games on graphs, the protagonist tries to achieve an objective while the antagonist aims to prevent it. Objectives for which both players do not need to use memory to play optimally are well-understood and characterized both in finite and infinite graphs. Less is known about the larger class of half-positional objectives, i.e., those for which the protagonist does not need memory (but for which the antagonist might). In particular, no characterization of half-positionality is known for the central class of ω-regular objectives. Here, we characterize objectives recognizable by deterministic Büchi automata (a class of ω-regular objectives) that are half-positional, both over finite and infinite graphs. This characterization yields a polynomial-time algorithm to decide half-positionality of an objective recognized by a given deterministic Büchi automaton.
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Sister Conferences Best Papers: Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems
Sister Conferences Best Papers: Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization