Meta-strategies in the Colored Trails Game

This paper1 presents a novel technique to reduce large-scale strategic interactions to bilateral normal-form games with a significantly smaller strategy space, while preserving many of the strategic characteristics of the original setting. We demonstrate our technique on the Colored Trails (CT) framework, which allows to model a large variety of multi-agent interactions. We define a set of representative heuristics describing players' actions, called meta-strategies, and show that a three-player CT game decomposes into pairwise social dilemma games. We also present a set of criteria for generating interesting CT game instances and show that these instances indeed decompose into social dilemmas.