Search for: All records

Mixed strategies are often evaluated based on the expected payoff that they guarantee. This is not always desirable. In this paper, we consider games for which maximizing the expected payoff deviates from the actual goal of the players. To address this issue, we introduce the notion of a (u,p)-maxmin strategy which ensures receiving a minimum utility of u with probability at least p. We then give approximation algorithms for the problem of finding a (u, p)-maxmin strategy for these games. The first game that we consider is Colonel Blotto, a well-studied game that was introduced in 1921. In the Colonel Blotto game, two colonels divide their troops among a set of battlefields. Each battlefield is won by the colonel that puts more troops in it. The payoff of each colonel is the weighted number of battlefields that she wins. We show that maximizing the expected payoff of a player does not necessarily maximize her winning probability for certain applications of Colonel Blotto. For example, in presidential elections, the players’ goal is to maximize the probability of winning more than half of the votes, rather than maximizing the expected number of votes that they get. We give an exact algorithm for a natural variant of continuous version of this game. More generally, we provide constant and logarithmic approximation algorithms for finding (u, p)-maxmin strategies. We also introduce a security game version of Colonel Blotto which we call auditing game. It is played between two players, a defender and an attacker. The goal of the defender is to prevent the attacker from changing the outcome of an instance of Colonel Blotto. Again, maximizing the expected payoff of the defender is not necessarily optimal. Therefore we give a constant approximation for (u, p)-maxmin strategies. 

Population protocols are a popular model of distributed computing, in which randomly-interacting agents with little computational power cooperate to jointly perform computational tasks. Inspired by developments in molecular computation, and in particular DNA computing, recent algorithmic work has focused on the complexity of solving simple yet fundamental tasks in the population model, such as leader election (which requires convergence to a single agent in a special “leader” state), and majority (in which agents must converge to a decision as to which of two possible initial states had higher initial count). Known results point towards an inherent trade-off between the time complexity of such algorithms, and the space complexity, i.e. size of the memory available to each agent. In this paper, we explore this trade-off and provide new upper and lower bounds for majority and leader election. First, we prove a unified lower bound, which relates the space available per node with the time complexity achievable by a protocol: for instance, our result implies that any protocol solving either of these tasks for n agents using O(log log n) states must take Ω(n/polylogn) expected time. This is the first result to characterize time complexity for protocols which employ super-constant number of states per node, and proves that fast, poly-logarithmic running times require protocols to have relatively large space costs. On the positive side, we give algorithms showing that fast, poly-logarithmic convergence time can be achieved using O (log2 n) space per node, in the case of both tasks. Overall, our results highlight a time complexity separation between O (log log n) and Θ(log2 n) state space size for both majority and leader election in population protocols, and introduce new techniques, which should be applicable more broadly.