Stochastic Multiplayer Games PDF Download

We consider stochastic games that are played on finite graphs. The subject of the first part are two-player stochastic games with perfect information. In such games the two players take turns choosing actions from a finite set, for an infinite duration, resulting in an infinite play. The objective of the game is given by a Borel-measurable and bounded payoff function that maps infinite plays to real numbers. The first player wants to maximize the expected payoff, and the second player has the opposite objective, that of minimizing the expected payoff. We prove that if the payoff function is both shift-invariant and submixing then the game is half-positional. This means that the first player has an optimal strategy that is at the same time pure and memoryless. Both players have perfect information, so the actions are chosen based on the whole history. In the second part we study finite-duration games where the protagonist player has zero information. That is, he gets no feedback from the game and consequently his strategy is a finite word over the set of actions. Probabilistic finite automata can be seen as an example of such a game that has only a single player. First we compare two classes of probabilistic automata: leaktight automata and simple automata, for which the value 1 problem is known to be decidable. We prove that simple automata are a strict subset of leaktight automata. Then we consider half-blind games, which are two player games where the maximizer has zero information and the minimizer is perfectly informed. We define the class of leaktight half-blind games and prove that it has a decidable maxmin reachability problem.