A Novel Stochastic Game Via the Quantitative μ-calculus

• Authors: Annabelle McIver;Carroll Morgan
• Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
• Year: 2006

The quantitative @m-calculus qM@m extends the applicability of Kozen's standard @m-calculus [D. Kozen, Results on the propositional @m-calculus, Theoretical Computer Science 27 (1983) 333-354] to probabilistic systems. Subsequent to its introduction [C. Morgan, and A. McIver, A probabilistic temporal calculus based on expectations, in: L. Groves and S. Reeves, editors, Proc. Formal Methods Pacific '97 (1997), available at [PSG, Probabilistic Systems Group: Collected reports, http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/research/areas/probs/bibliography.html]; also appears at [A. McIver, and C. Morgan, ''Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilistic Systems,'' Technical Monographs in Computer Science, Springer, New York, 2005, Chap. 9], M. Huth, and M. Kwiatkowska, Quantitative analysis and model checking, in: Proceedings of 12th annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 1997] it has been developed by us [A. McIver, and C. Morgan, Games, probability and the quantitative @m-calculus qMu, in: Proc. LPAR, LNAI 2514 (2002), pp. 292-310, revised and expanded at [A. McIver, and C. Morgan, Results on the quantitative @m-calculus qM@m (2005), to appear in ACM TOCL]; also appears at [A. McIver, and C. Morgan, ''Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilistic Systems,'' Technical Monographs in Computer Science, Springer, New York, 2005, Chap. 11], A. McIver, and C. Morgan, ''Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilistic Systems,'' Technical Monographs in Computer Science, Springer, New York, 2005, A. McIver, and C. Morgan, Results on the quantitative @m-calculus qM@m (2005), to appear in ACM TOCL] and by others [L. de Alfaro, and R. Majumdar, Quantitative solution of omega-regular games, Journal of Computer and System Sciences 68 (2004) 374-397]. Beyond its natural application to define probabilistic temporal logic [C. Morgan, and A. McIver, An expectation-based model for probabilistic temporal logic, Logic Journal of the IGPL 7 (1999), pp. 779-804, also appears at [A. McIver, and C. Morgan, ''Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilistic Systems,'' Technical Monographs in Computer Science, Springer, New York, 2005, Chap.10]], there are a number of other areas that benefit from its use. One application is stochastic two-player games, and the contribution of this paper is to depart from the usual notion of ''absolute winning conditions'' and to introduce a novel game in which players can ''draw''. The extension is motivated by examples based on economic games: we propose an extension to qM@m so that they can be specified; we show that the extension can be expressed via a reduction to the original logic; and, via that reduction, we prove that the players can play optimally in the extended game using memoryless strategies.