Instances and Encoder for Positional Games

Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into QBF such that a game instance admits a winning strategy for first player if and only if the corresponding formula is true. Our approach improves over previous QBF encodings of games in multiple ways. First, it is generic and lets us encode other positional games, such as Hex. Second, structural properties of positional games together with a careful treatment of illegal moves let us generate more compact instances that can be solved faster by state-of-the-art QBF solvers. We establish the latter fact through extensive experiments. Finally, the compactness of our new encoding makes it feasible to translate realistic game problems. We identify a few such problems of historical significance and put them forward to the QBF community as milestones of increasing difficulty.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.05098

Generation of Benchmark

The benchmarks can be generated and placed in the folder qbf with the command:

./make_benchmark.sh

Need to install https://github.com/vale1410/bule v2.11.0

Positional Game Description 1.0

The general encoder reads a game description and produces a QDIMACS file that can be passed to a QBF solver. We briefly explain the format in which the game is specified. Files have the file type .pg.

A line in the file is either a codeword that starts with #, a list of vertices or time points separated by white space. A vertex and time points must be alphanumeric strings. After each code word the program expects one or more lines, each consisting of a list of vertices or time points separated by white space. The lines are read until the next code word or EOF (end of file).

Code word	Game Specification	Comment
#times	T	List of time points in the order of the game.
#blackturns	T-black	List of time points in which black plays. (Whites time points Twhite = T\setminus Tblack)
#positions	V	The vertex set given as a list of vertices.
#blackwins	E-black	Each line consists of a list of vertices that define one winning configuration
#whitewins	E-white	Analog to #blackwins
#blackinitials	-	List of vertices that black owns before the game starts
#whiteinitials	-	Analog to #blackinitials
#firstmoves	-	List of vertices that can be chosen from in the first move.
#version		Version number of the game description. Currently 1.0.

Examples for game description language

#version
1.0
#times
t4 t5 t6 t7 t8 t9
#blackturns
t5 t7 t9
#positions
a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 c1 c2 c3
#blackwins
a1 b1 c1 
a2 b2 c2 
a3 b3 c3 
a1 a2 a3 
b1 b2 b3 
c1 c2 c3 
a1 b2 c3 
a3 b2 c1
#blackinitials
b2 c3
#whitewins
a1 b1 c1 
a2 b2 c2 
a3 b3 c3 
a1 a2 a3 
b1 b2 b3 
c1 c2 c3 
a1 b2 c3 
a3 b2 c1
#whiteinitials
a1