Pretty Good Strategies and Where to Find Them

Abstract: Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not only when an ideal strategy cannot be found due to the complexity of the problem, but also when no winning strategy exists at all. We propose an algorithm for synthesis of such "pretty good" strategies. The idea is to first generate a surely winning strategy with perfect information, and then iteratively improve it with respect to two criteria of dominance: one based on the amount of conflicting decisions in the strategy, and the other related to the tightness of its outcome set. We focus on reachability goals and evaluate the algorithm experimentally with very promising results.