Domino Games and Complexity

Abstract

Domino games which describe computations of alternating Turing machines in the same way as dominoes (tiling systems) encode computations of deterministic and nondeterministic Turing machines are considered. The domino games are two-person games in the course of which the players build up domino tilings of a square of prescribed size. Acceptance of an alternating Turing machine corresponds to a winning strategy for one player—the number of moves in the game is the number of alternations of the Turing machine. Let $\operatorname{ATIME}(T(n), m)$ denote the class of all sets that are accepted by some alternating Turing machine in time $T(n)$ with at most m alternations. It is shown that any problem in such a complexity class can be reduced to the strategy problem for some domino game. In particular domino games which are complete in the classes $\Sigma_{m}^{p}$, and $\Pi_{m}^{p}$, of the polynomial time hierarchy are found. This corresponds to the approach of Savelsbergh and van Emde Boas and of Lewis and Papadimitriou, who have shown that the theory of NP-completeness may also be founded on a finite domino problem instead of the satisfiability problem for propositional formulae. Similar generalizations are possible for domino connectability problems: Domino thread games where the players build up a thread of dominoes are introduced; the first player wins if he can ultimately connect two given points. It is shown that a certain class of such games captures deterministic time complexity. In particular, games are found whose strategy problems are P-complete. In the last section applications to the complexity of simple prefix classes in logical theories are briefly discussed.