Games with recurring certainty

• Main Authors: Dietmar Berwanger, Anup Basil Mathew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Publishing Association 2014-04-01
• Series: Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
• Online Access: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.7770v1

Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are known to be intractable, unless the information flow is severely restricted. Examples of undecidable cases typically feature a situation where players become uncertain about the current state of the game, and this uncertainty lasts forever. Here we consider games where the players attain certainty about the current state over and over again along any play. For finite-state games, we note that this kind of recurring certainty implies a stronger condition of periodic certainty, that is, the events of state certainty ultimately occur at uniform, regular intervals. We show that it is decidable whether a given game presents recurring certainty, and that, if so, the problem of synthesising coordination strategies under w-regular winning conditions is solvable.