GRD Journals | Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology (ICIET) - 2016 | July 2016
e-ISSN: 2455-5703
Quantum Algorithms to Find Equilibrium in Sequential Games 1
Arish Pitchai 2A. V. Reddy 3Nickolas Savarimuthu 1,2,3 Department of Computer Applications 1,2,3 National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli 620015, India Abstract Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SGPE) is a special refinement of Nash equilibrium used in sequential games. A couple of quantum algorithms is presented in this paper to compute SGPE in a finite extensive form game with perfect information. The quantum search tools, Grover’s operator and Discrete quantum walk, are used to design the algorithms. A full-width game tree of average branching factor b and height h has n = O(bh) nodes in it. It will be shown in this paper that our algorithm uses O(n/(b1/2)) oracle queries to backtrack to the solution. The resultant speed-up is O(b1/2) times better than the best known classical approach, Zermelo's algorithm. Keyword- Quantum algorithm, discrete quantum random walk, Quantum game theory, Algorithmic game theory, Sequential game, Nash Equilibrium, Subgame Perfect Equilibrium, Backward induction __________________________________________________________________________________________________
I. INTRODUCTION Game theory is concerned more with the study of strategic decision making scenarios than the simultaneous ones. The strategic game model, where sequential decisions made by each player are informed to all other players is called the extensive form game with perfect information. One of the most important solution concept defined by John Nash is the idea of Equilibrium [Osborne et al. (1994)]. To eliminate the threats that are not credible, Selten (1975) introduced subgame perfect equilibrium in extensive form games. Subgame perfectness is a refinement of Nash equilibrium based on the principle of sequential rationality. Our problem is to identify this strategy profile in a game tree (or extensive form game). This concept of sequential rationality is widely used in economics, psychology, computer science [Cigler et al. (2014)], biology, politics and more to solve complex problems. Classically, the best way to solve this problem uses backward induction [Osborne et al. (1994)] which requires O(n) queries, where n is the number of nodes present in a game tree. In this paper, we present two quantum algorithms that detect perfect equilibrium with O(n/√b) queries, where b is the average branching factor. Our algorithms use Grover’s search operator and discrete quantum walk in combination with Zermelo’s backward induction method. Grover's search operator is used for searching an unsorted database with n elements in O(√n) time and using O(log n) storage space [Grover (1996)]. Discrete quantum walks have shown similar speed-up in search spaces such as hypercube, grids and more [Ambainis (2003)]. We take each smallest possible sub-tree of the game tree from the deepest level and quanta mechanically search for the node containing optimal value. Root of each sub-tree is updated with the search result and the same procedure is continued till the root of the game tree is reached. For simplicity, our quantum algorithms are assumed to be applied on a full-width game tree with uniform branching factor. The paper is organized as follows. We begin section 2 with relevant definitions of game tree, Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. Reviewing the existing techniques to solve the problem is done in section 3. Preliminaries required for the better understanding of the algorithms are given in section 4. Detailed description of the quantum algorithms based on Grover's operator and discrete quantum walk to identify subgame perfect equilibrium and their results are provided in section 5. In section 6, impact of quantum computation in solving the problem is discussed. We conclude this paper in section 7 with the limitations of our approach and open problems in quantum game theory.
II. PROBLEM DEFINITION The following are some basic definitions needed to understand the problem: 1) Definition 1: A finite extensive form game is given by a tuple T = ({X i}ih, q) where h is the height of the game tree Xi is the set of moves at level i q: X1 … Xh ℝk is the outcome function, where k is the number of players.
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