Tropical Linear Spaces and Tropical Convexity

In classical geometry, a linear space is a space that is closed under linear combinations. In tropical geometry, it has long been a consensus that tropical varieties defined by valuated matroids are the tropical analogue of linear spaces. It is not difficult to see that each such space is tropically convex, i.e. closed under tropical linear combinations. However, we will also show that the converse is true: Each tropical variety that is also tropically convex is supported on the complex of a valuated matroid. We also prove a tropical local-to-global principle: Any closed, connected, locally tropically convex set is tropically convex.

TROPICAL POLYHEDRA ARE EQUIVALENT TO MEAN PAYOFF GAMES

We show that several decision problems originating from max-plus or tropical convexity are equivalent to zero-sum two player game problems. In particular, we set up an equivalence between the external representation of tropical convex sets and zero-sum stochastic games, in which tropical polyhedra correspond to deterministic games with finite action spaces. Then, we show that the winning initial positions can be determined from the associated tropical polyhedron. We obtain as a corollary a game theoretical proof of the fact that the tropical rank of a matrix, defined as the maximal size of a submatrix for which the optimal assignment problem has a unique solution, coincides with the maximal number of rows (or columns) of the matrix which are linearly independent in the tropical sense. Our proofs rely on techniques from non-linear Perron–Frobenius theory.