Related papers: The ANTS problem
This paper tackles a multi-agent bandit setting where $M$ agents cooperate together to solve the same instance of a $K$-armed stochastic bandit problem. The agents are \textit{heterogeneous}: each agent has limited access to a local subset…
Ants are very small insects.They are capable to find food even they are complete blind. The ants lives in their nest and their job is to search food while they get hungry. We are not interested in their living style, such as how they live,…
We prove a few new lower bounds on the randomized competitive ratio for the $k$-server problem and other related problems, resolving some long-standing conjectures. In particular, for metrical task systems (MTS) we asympotically settle the…
r-gathering problem is a variant of facility location problems. In this problem, we are given a set of users and a set of facilities on same metric space. We open some of the facilities and assign each user to an open facility, so that at…
We study deterministic online algorithms for the problem of chasing sets of cardinality at most $k$ in a metric space, also known as metrical service systems and equivalent to width-$k$ layered graph traversal. We resolve the 30-year-old…
We consider search by mobile agents for a hidden, idle target, placed on the infinite line. Feasible solutions are agent trajectories in which all agents reach the target sooner or later. A special feature of our problem is that the agents…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
Suppose that a set of $m$ tasks are to be shared as equally as possible amongst a set of $n$ resources. A game-theoretic mechanism to find a suitable allocation is to associate each task with a ``selfish agent'', and require each agent to…
The rendezvous task calls for two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of a network modeled as a graph to meet at the same node. Agents have different labels which are integers from a set $\{1,\dots,L\}$. They wake up at possibly…
We study randomized test-and-set (TAS) implementations from registers in the asynchronous shared memory model with n processes. We introduce the problem of group election, a natural variant of leader election, and propose a framework for…
We study Matching and other related problems in a partial information setting where the agents' utilities for being matched to other agents are hidden and the mechanism only has access to ordinal preference information. Our model is…
Existing methods for retrieving k-nearest neighbours suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We argue this is caused in part by inherent deficiencies of space partitioning, which is the underlying strategy used by most existing methods. We…
The hypothetical global delivery schedule of Santa Claus must follow strict rolling night-time windows that vary with the Earth's rotation and obey an energy budget that depends on payload size and cruising speed. To design this schedule,…
We consider the problem where an agent wants to find a hidden object that is randomly located in some vertex of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) according to a fixed but possibly unknown distribution. The agent can only examine vertices whose…
Leader election is one of the fundamental and well-studied problems in distributed computing. In this paper, we initiate the study of leader election using mobile agents. Suppose $n$ agents are positioned initially arbitrarily on the nodes…
We propose a new probabilistic ant-based heuristic (ANTH-LS) for the longest simple cycle problem. This NP-hard problem has numerous real-world applications in complex networks, including efficient construction of graph layouts, analysis of…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Behavioral heterogeneities in animals, also known as syndromes, play a crucial role in understanding how natural populations flexibly adapt to environmental changes. In ant species like \textit{Aphaenogaster senilis}, two key roles in…
Consider a dynamic task allocation problem, where tasks are unknowingly distributed over an environment. This paper considers each task comprised of two sequential subtasks: detection and completion, where each subtask can only be carried…
Simulated annealing (SA) attracts more attention among classical heuristic algorithms because the solution of the combinatorial optimization problem can be naturally mapped to the ground state of the Ising Hamiltonian. However, in practical…