Dear editor,rnThe concept of potential games was proposed for the first time by Rosenthal in 1973 [1].The seminal study by Monderer and Shapley [2] presented systematic investigation and fundamental results for this kind of games.Some of its recent developments can be found in [3].Because of some nice properties, potential games have been applied to many control and optimization problems, for instance the existence of Nash equilibria [4] and game theoretic control [5].rnIn either theoretical investigations or applications, two fundamental issues should be solved, which are (i) verifying whether a game is potential and (ii) calculating potential function.