Laurent Doyen ; Pranshu Gaba ; Shibashis Guha - Stochastic Window Mean-Payoff Games

lmcs:13582 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, June 5, 2025, Volume 21, Issue 2 - https://doi.org/10.46298/lmcs-21(2:19)2025
Stochastic Window Mean-Payoff GamesArticle

Authors: Laurent Doyen ORCID; Pranshu Gaba ORCID; Shibashis Guha ORCID

    Stochastic two-player games model systems with an environment that is both adversarial and stochastic. The adversarial part of the environment is modeled by a player (Player 2) who tries to prevent the system (Player 1) from achieving its objective. We consider finitary versions of the traditional mean-payoff objective, replacing the long-run average of the payoffs by payoff average computed over a finite sliding window. Two variants have been considered: in one variant, the maximum window length is fixed and given, while in the other, it is not fixed but is required to be bounded. For both variants, we present complexity bounds and algorithmic solutions for computing strategies for Player 1 to ensure that the objective is satisfied with positive probability, with probability 1, or with probability at least $p$, regardless of the strategy of Player 2. The solution crucially relies on a reduction to the special case of non-stochastic two-player games. We give a general characterization of prefix-independent objectives for which this reduction holds. The memory requirement for both players in stochastic games is also the same as in non-stochastic games by our reduction. Moreover, for non-stochastic games, we improve upon the upper bound for the memory requirement of Player 1 and upon the lower bound for the memory requirement of Player 2.


    Volume: Volume 21, Issue 2
    Published on: June 5, 2025
    Accepted on: March 19, 2025
    Submitted on: May 14, 2024
    Keywords: Computer Science - Computer Science and Game Theory

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