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Solving Parity Games in Practice

  • Conference paper
Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5799))

Abstract

Parity games are 2-player games of perfect information and infinite duration that have important applications in automata theory and decision procedures (validity as well as model checking) for temporal logics. In this paper we investigate practical aspects of solving parity games. The main contribution is a suggestion on how to solve parity games efficiently in practice: we present a generic solver that intertwines optimisations with any of the existing parity game algorithms which is only called on parts of a game that cannot be solved faster by simpler methods. This approach is evaluated empirically on a series of benchmarking games from the aforementioned application domains, showing that using this approach vastly speeds up the solving process. As a side-effect we obtain the surprising observation that Zielonka’s recursive algorithm is the best parity game solver in practice.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Munich, Germany

    Oliver Friedmann & Martin Lange

Authors
  1. Oliver Friedmann
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  2. Martin Lange
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute of Software Technology (UNI-IIST), United Nations University, Macao, China

    Zhiming Liu

  2. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, 9220, Aalborg, Denmark

    Anders P. Ravn

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Friedmann, O., Lange, M. (2009). Solving Parity Games in Practice. In: Liu, Z., Ravn, A.P. (eds) Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis. ATVA 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5799. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04761-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04761-9_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04760-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04761-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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