Winning a tournament by any means necessary

Sushmita Gupta, Sanjukta Roy, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

In a tournament, n players enter the competition. In each round, they are paired-up to compete against each other. Losers are thrown, while winners proceed to the next round, until only one player (the winner) is left. Given a prediction of the outcome, for every pair of players, of a match between them (modeled by a digraph D), the competitive nature of a tournament makes it attractive for manipulators. In the Tournament Fixing (TF) problem, the goal is to decide if we can conduct the competition (by controlling how players are paired-up) so that our favorite player w wins. A common form of manipulation is to bribe players to alter the outcome of matches. Kim and Williams [IJCAI 2015] integrated such deceit into TF, and showed that the resulting problem is NP-hard when ` < (1 − ) log n alterations are possible (for any fixed > 0). For this problem, our contribution is fourfold. First, we present two operations that “obfuscate deceit”: given one solution, they produce another solution. Second, we present a combinatorial result, stating that there is always a solution with all reversals incident to w and “elite players”. Third, we give a closed formula for the case where D is a DAG. Finally, we present exact exponential-time and parameterized algorithms for the general case.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2018
EditorsJerome Lang
PublisherInternational Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
Pages282-288
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9780999241127
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2018
Event27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2018 - Stockholm, Sweden
Duration: 13 Jul 201819 Jul 2018

Publication series

NameIJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume2018-July
ISSN (Print)1045-0823

Conference

Conference27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2018
Country/TerritorySweden
CityStockholm
Period13/07/1819/07/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence

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