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Beyond Value Iteration for Parity Games: Strategy Iteration with Universal Trees

Authors Zhuan Khye Koh , Georg Loho

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Author Details

Zhuan Khye Koh
  • Department of Mathematics, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
Georg Loho
  • Discrete Mathematics and Mathematical Programming, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 757481-ScaleOpt).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the helpful comments and support by L{á}szló A. Végh. We would also like to thank Xavier Allamigeon, Nathanaël Fijalkow and Marcin Jurdzi{ń}ski for inspiring discussions.

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Zhuan Khye Koh and Georg Loho. Beyond Value Iteration for Parity Games: Strategy Iteration with Universal Trees. In 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 241, pp. 63:1-63:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2022.63

Abstract

Parity games have witnessed several new quasi-polynomial algorithms since the breakthrough result of Calude et al. (STOC 2017). The combinatorial object underlying these approaches is a universal tree, as identified by Czerwiński et al. (SODA 2019). By proving a quasi-polynomial lower bound on the size of a universal tree, they have highlighted a barrier that must be overcome by all existing approaches to attain polynomial running time. This is due to the existence of worst case instances which force these algorithms to explore a large portion of the tree.
As an attempt to overcome this barrier, we propose a strategy iteration framework which can be applied on any universal tree. It is at least as fast as its value iteration counterparts, while allowing one to take bigger leaps in the universal tree. Our main technical contribution is an efficient method for computing the least fixed point of 1-player games. This is achieved via a careful adaptation of shortest path algorithms to the setting of ordered trees. By plugging in the universal tree of Jurdziński and Lazić (LICS 2017), or the Strahler universal tree of Daviaud et al. (ICALP 2020), we obtain instantiations of the general framework that take time O(mn²log nlog d) and O(mn²log³ n log d) respectively per iteration.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
  • Theory of computation → Logic and verification
  • Mathematics of computing → Discrete mathematics
Keywords
  • parity games
  • strategy iteration
  • value iteration
  • progress measure
  • universal trees

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