Strategy Logic with Imperfect Information

Abstract

We introduce an extension of Strategy Logic for the imperfect-information setting, called SLii, and study its model-checking problem. As this logic naturally captures multi-player games with imperfect information, this problem is undecidable; but we introduce a syntactical class of "hierarchical instances" for which, intuitively, as one goes down the syntactic tree of the formula, strategy quantifications are concerned with finer observations of the model, and we prove that model-checking SLii restricted to hierarchical instances is decidable. To establish this result we go through QCTL, an intermediary, "low-level" logic much more adapted to automata techniques. QCTL is an extension of CTL with second-order quantification over atomic propositions. We extend it to the imperfect information setting by parameterising second-order quantifiers with observations. While the model-checking problem of QCTLii is, in general, undecidable, we identify a syntactic fragment of hierarchical formulas and prove, using an automata-theoretic approach, that it is decidable. We apply our result to solve complex strategic problems in the imperfect-information setting. We first show that the existence of Nash equilibria for deterministic strategies is decidable in games with hierarchical information. We also introduce distributed rational synthesis, a generalisation of rational synthesis to the imperfect-information setting. Because it can easily be expressed in our logic, our main result provides solution to this problem in the case of hierarchical information.