English

# Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Paper

#### On Randomized Fictitious Play for Approximating Saddle Points Over Convex Sets

##### MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons44374

Elbassioni,  Khaled
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons45021

Mehlhorn,  Kurt
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons45252

Ramezani,  Fahimeh
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

##### External Ressource
No external resources are shared
##### Fulltext (public)

arXiv:1301.5290.pdf
(Preprint), 666KB

##### Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
##### Citation

Elbassioni, K., Makino, K., Mehlhorn, K., & Ramezani, F. (2014). On Randomized Fictitious Play for Approximating Saddle Points Over Convex Sets. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5290.

Cite as: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0024-5E4C-C
##### Abstract
Given two bounded convex sets $X\subseteq\RR^m$ and $Y\subseteq\RR^n,$ specified by membership oracles, and a continuous convex-concave function $F:X\times Y\to\RR$, we consider the problem of computing an $\eps$-approximate saddle point, that is, a pair $(x^*,y^*)\in X\times Y$ such that $\sup_{y\in Y} F(x^*,y)\le \inf_{x\in X}F(x,y^*)+\eps.$ Grigoriadis and Khachiyan (1995) gave a simple randomized variant of fictitious play for computing an $\eps$-approximate saddle point for matrix games, that is, when $F$ is bilinear and the sets $X$ and $Y$ are simplices. In this paper, we extend their method to the general case. In particular, we show that, for functions of constant "width", an $\eps$-approximate saddle point can be computed using $O^*(\frac{(n+m)}{\eps^2}\ln R)$ random samples from log-concave distributions over the convex sets $X$ and $Y$. It is assumed that $X$ and $Y$ have inscribed balls of radius $1/R$ and circumscribing balls of radius $R$. As a consequence, we obtain a simple randomized polynomial-time algorithm that computes such an approximation faster than known methods for problems with bounded width and when $\eps \in (0,1)$ is a fixed, but arbitrarily small constant. Our main tool for achieving this result is the combination of the randomized fictitious play with the recently developed results on sampling from convex sets.