Matching is as easy as matrix inversion
Combinatorica
Cyclic games and an algorithm to find minimax cycle means in directed graphs
USSR Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics
Cyclical games with prohibitions
Mathematical Programming: Series A and B
The complexity of mean payoff games on graphs
Theoretical Computer Science
Smoothed analysis of algorithms: Why the simplex algorithm usually takes polynomial time
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Typical Properties of Winners and Losers [0.2ex] in Discrete Optimization
SIAM Journal on Computing
Cyclic games and linear programming
Discrete Applied Mathematics
Smoothed analysis: an attempt to explain the behavior of algorithms in practice
Communications of the ACM - A View of Parallel Computing
The Complexity of Solving Stochastic Games on Graphs
ISAAC '09 Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation
On the equilibria of alternating move games
SODA '10 Proceedings of the twenty-first annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
A pumping algorithm for ergodic stochastic mean payoff games with perfect information
IPCO'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization
Polynomial-Time algorithms for energy games with special weight structures
ESA'12 Proceedings of the 20th Annual European conference on Algorithms
ICALP'13 Proceedings of the 40th international conference on Automata, Languages, and Programming - Volume Part I
A note on the approximation of mean-payoff games
Information Processing Letters
Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper, we consider two-player zero-sum stochastic mean payoff games with perfect information modeled by a digraph with black, white, and random vertices. These BWR-games games are polynomially equivalent with the classical Gillette games, which include many well-known subclasses, such as cyclic games, simple stochastic games, stochastic parity games, and Markov decision processes. They can also be used to model parlor games such as Chess or Backgammon. It is a long-standing open question if a polynomial algorithm exists that solves BWR-games. In fact, a pseudo-polynomial algorithm for these games with an arbitrary number of random nodes would already imply their polynomial solvability. Currently, only two classes are known to have such a pseudo-polynomial algorithm: BW-games (the case with no random nodes) and ergodic BWR-games (in which the game's value does not depend on the initial position) with constant number of random nodes. In this paper, we show that the existence of a pseudopolynomial algorithm for BWR-games with constant number of random vertices implies smoothed polynomial complexity and the existence of absolute and relative polynomial-time approximation schemes. In particular, we obtain smoothed polynomial complexity and derive absolute and relative approximation schemes for BW-games and ergodic BWR-games (assuming a technical requirement about the probabilities at the random nodes).