December 2: Piercesare Secchi, Politecnico di Milano

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

SEMINAR

School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Optimal Strategies For Two-Person, Zero-Sum Stochastic Games.

Piercesare Secchi
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Thursday, December 2, 1999
4:00-5:00 PM, Room B25 Classroom Office Building, St. Paul
Social at 3:30 PM in Room 354 Classroom Office Building

Abstract

A two-person, zero-sum stochastic game is a competition between two players with opposite interests who aim at controlling a stochastic process {X_n} on a state space S. At each stage of the game each player chooses an action from a given set; the two actions and the current state X_n of the game determine the distribution of the next state X_{n + 1}. The payoff of the game is a function of the sequence of states visited by the process {X_n}.

After a short introduction to the theory of stochastic games along the lines of Maitra and Sudderth (1996), I will consider the problem regarding the determination of optimal or nearly optimal strategies for playing such games. In particular, I will focus on stationary strategies, that is those which, at each stage of the game, forget the past history of it and choose an action as a function only of the current state of the game.