Fast and Simple Solutions of Blotto Games

The Colonel Blotto game (initially introduced by Borel in 1921) is commonly used for analyzing a wide range of applications from the U.S.Ppresidential election to innovative technology competitions to advertising, sports, and politics. After around a century Ahmadinejad et al. provided the first polynomial-time algorithm for computing the Nash equilibria in Colonel Blotto games. However, their algorithm consists of an exponential-size LP solved by the ellipsoid method, which is highly impractical. In “Fast and Simple Solutions of Blotto Games,” Behnezhad, Dehghani, Derakhshan, Hajighayi, and Seddighin provide the first polynomial-size LP formulation of the optimal strategies for the Colonel Blotto game using linear extension techniques. They use this polynomial-size LP to provide a simpler and significantly faster algorithm for finding optimal strategies of the Colonel Blotto game. They further show this representation is asymptotically tight, which means there exists no other linea...