Stop Gambling! It Just Takes Too Long
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Chapter in book/Anthology/Report › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
The classical stochastic shortest path problem (SSPP) on integer-weighted Markov decision processes asks for a scheduler that maximizes the expected accumulated weight before reaching a goal state while ensuring that the goal is reached almost surely. In this article, we introduce the positively almost-surely terminating stochastic shortest path problem (PAST-SSPP), a variant of the classical SSPP, where the additional requirement is made that the expected number of steps for reaching the goal has to be finite. We show that PAST-SSPP can be solved in polynomial time. To this end, we provide an extension of the well-known spider construction as introduced by Christel Baier et al. used for the solution of the classical SSPP.
Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Principles of Formal Quantitative Analysis |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media B.V. |
| Pages | 139-157 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 978-3-031-97439-7 |
| ISBN (print) | 978-3-031-97438-0 |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 30 Aug 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Publication series
| Series | Lecture notes in computer science |
|---|---|
| Volume | LNCS 15760 |
| ISSN | 0302-9743 |
External IDs
| ORCID | /0000-0003-4829-0476/work/194824700 |
|---|---|
| ORCID | /0000-0003-1724-2586/work/194825125 |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- almost-sure termination, Markov decision processes, optional stopping theorem, Stochastic shortest path problem