Tree Polymatrix Games Are PPAD-Hard

Argyrios Deligkas, John Fearnley, Rahul Savani

Abstract: We prove that it is PPAD-hard to compute a Nash equilibrium in a tree polymatrix game with twenty actions per player. This is the first PPAD hardness result for a game with a constant number of actions per player where the interaction graph is acyclic. Along the way we show PPAD-hardness for finding an ε-fixed point of a 2D-LinearFIXP instance, when ε is any constant less than (√2 - 1)/2 ≈ 0.2071. This lifts the hardness regime from polynomially small approximations in k-dimensions to constant approximations in two-dimensions, and our constant is substantial when compared to the trivial upper bound of 0.5.