Using Reasoning Patterns to Simplify Games

Abstract

In complex strategic situations decision-making agents interact with many other agents and have access to many pieces of information throughout their play. This usu-ally leads to game solving being a very complex, almost intractable procedure. Moreover, algorithms for solving games usually fail to explain how the various equilibria come about and how “plausible ” they are. Reasoning patterns try to capture the strategic thinking of agents and formalize the usage of the various information or evidence they obtain during their interactions. Identify-ing reasoning patterns can lead to a significant refine-ment over the full range of equilibria, as well as con-siderable computational savings in solving the game. Here we present a polynomial-time algorithm that sim-