Games for Learning: A Sabotage Approach

In formal approaches to inductive learning, the ability to learn is understood as the ability to single out a correct hypothesis from a range of possibilities. Although most of the existing research focuses on the characteristics of the learner, in many paradigms the significance of the teacher’s abilities and strategies is in fact undeniable. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we highlight the interactive nature of learning by proposing a game-theoretical and logical approach. We consider learning as a sabotagetype game between Teacher and Learner, and present different variants based on the level of cooperativeness and the actions available to the players. We characterize the existence of a winning strategy in such games by formulas of Sabotage Modal Logic, analyzing also their complexity. Our work constitutes the first step towards a unified game-theoretical and logical approach to formal learning theory.