Playing Against Opponents With Limited Memory

Abstract: We study \emph{partial-information} two-player turn-based games on graphs with omega-regular objectives, when the partial-information player has \emph{limited memory}. Such games are a natural formalization for reactive synthesis when the environment player is not genuinely adversarial to the system player. The environment player has goals of its own, but the exact goal of the environment player is unknown to the system player. We prove that the problem of determining the existence of a winning strategy for the system player is PSPACE-hard for reachability, safety, and parity objectives. Moreover, when the environment player is memoryless, the problem is PSPACE-complete. However, it is simpler to decide if the environment player has a winning strategy; it is only NP-complete. Additionally, we construct a game where the the partial-information player needs at least $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$ bits of memory to retain winning strategies in a game of size $\mathcal{O}(n)$.