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International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

CP 2014: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming pp 58–74Cite as

A Complete Solver for Constraint Games

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8656))

Abstract

Game Theory studies situations in which multiple agents having conflicting objectives have to reach a collective decision. The question of a compact representation language for agents utility function is of crucial importance since the classical representation of a n-players game is given by a n-dimensional matrix of exponential size for each player. In this paper we use the framework of Constraint Games in which CSP are used to represent utilities. Constraint Programming –including global constraints– allows to easily give a compact and elegant model to many useful games. Constraint Games come in two flavors: Constraint Satisfaction Games and Constraint Optimization Games, the first one using satisfaction to define boolean utilities. In addition to multimatrix games, it is also possible to model more complex games where hard constraints forbid certain situations. In this paper we study complete search techniques and show that our solver using the compact representation of Constraint Games is faster than the classical game solver Gambit by one to two orders of magnitude.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GREYC, Université de Caen, Campus Côte de Nacre, Boulevard du Maréchal Juin, BP 5186, 14032, Caen Cedex, France

    Thi-Van-Anh Nguyen & Arnaud Lallouet

Authors
  1. Thi-Van-Anh Nguyen
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  2. Arnaud Lallouet
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, School of Computer Science and IT, University College Cork, Western Road, Cork, Ireland

    Barry O’Sullivan

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Nguyen, TVA., Lallouet, A. (2014). A Complete Solver for Constraint Games. In: O’Sullivan, B. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8656. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10428-7_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10427-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10428-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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