Energy and Mean-Payoff Games with Imperfect Information

We consider two-player games with imperfect information and quantitative objective. The game is played on a weighted graph with a state space partitioned into classes of indistinguishable states, giving players partial knowledge of the state. In an energy game, the weights represent resource consumption and the objective of the game is to maintain the sum of weights always nonnegative. In a mean-payoff game, the objective is to optimize the limit-average usage of the resource. We show that the problem of determining if an energy game with imperfect information with fixed initial credit has a winning strategy is decidable, while the question of the existence of some initial credit such that the game has a winning strategy is undecidable. This undecidability result carries over to meanpayoff games with imperfect information. On the positive side, using a simple restriction on the game graph (namely, that the weights are visible), we show that these problems become EXPTIME-complete.