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arXiv · 2404.15483

Strategy Complexity of Büchi and Transience Objectives in Concurrent Stochastic Games

Stefan Kiefer·Richard Mayr·Mahsa Shirmohammadi·Patrick Totzke
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Abstract

We study 2-player stochastic games on countable graphs. Players Max and Min seek respectively to maximize and minimize the probability of satisfying the game objective. The Büchi objective is to visit a given set of states infinitely often. The Transience objective is to visit no state infinitely often. In Büchi games there exist $\varepsilon$-optimal Max strategies that use just a step counter plus 1 bit of public memory. This upper bound holds for all countable graphs, but is a new result even for finite graphs. It is tight, since Max strategies that use just a step counter, or just finite memory, are not sufficient even on finite game graphs. This upper bound follows from a slightly stronger new result: $\varepsilon$-optimal Max strategies for the combined Büchi and Transience objective require exactly 1 bit of public memory. Moreover, $\varepsilon$-optimal Max strategies for the Transience objective alone can be chosen as memoryless.

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Stefan Kiefer, Richard Mayr, Mahsa Shirmohammadi, Patrick Totzke. 2026-09-13. Strategy Complexity of Büchi and Transience Objectives in Concurrent Stochastic Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15483

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