GDL Meets ATL: A Logic for Game Description and Strategic Reasoning

Abstract

This paper presents a logical framework that extends the Game Description Language with coalition operators from Alternating-time Temporal Logic and prioritised strategy connectives. Our semantics is built upon the standard state transition model. The new framework allows us to formalise van Benthem’s game-oriented principles in multi-player games, and formally derive Weak Determinacy and Zermelo’s Theorem for two-player games. We demonstrate with a real-world game how to use our language to specify a game and design a strategy, and how to use our framework to verify a winning/no-losing strategy. Finally, we show that the model-checking problem of our logic is in 2EXPTIME with respect to the size of game structure and the length of formula, which is no worse than the model-checking problem in ATL.