GDL Meets ATL: A Logic for Game Description and Strategic Reasoning

This paper presents a logical framework that extends the Game Description Language with coalition operators from Alternatingtime Temporal Logic and prioritised strategy connectives. Our semantics is built upon the standard state transition model. The new framework allows us to formalise van Benthem’s game-oriented principles in multiplayer games, and formally derive Weak Determinacy and Zermelo’s Theorem for two-player games. We demonstrate with a real-world game how to use our language to specify a game and design a strategy, and how to use our framework to verify a winning/no-losing strategy. Finally, we show that the model-checking problem of our logic is in 2EXPTIME with respect to the size of game structure and the length of formula, which is no worse than the model-checking problem in ATL.