Related papers: On the Necessary Memory to Compute the Plurality i…
The sequential allocation protocol is a simple and popular mechanism to allocate indivisible goods, in which the agents take turns to pick the items according to a predefined sequence. While this protocol is not strategy-proof, it has been…
We consider the problem of multi-choice majority voting in a network of $n$ agents where each agent initially selects a choice from a set of $K$ possible choices. The agents try to infer the choice in majority merely by performing local…
We study population protocols: networks of anonymous agents that interact under a scheduler that picks pairs of agents uniformly at random. The _size counting problem_ is that of calculating the exact number $n$ of agents in the population,…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
In population protocols, the underlying distributed network consists of $n$ nodes (or agents), denoted by $V$, and a scheduler that continuously selects uniformly random pairs of nodes to interact. When two nodes interact, their states are…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
This work concerns the general issue of combined optimality in terms of time and space complexity. In this context, we study the problem of (exact) counting resource-limited and passively mobile nodes in the model of population protocols,…
Population protocols are a model for distributed computing that is focused on simplicity and robustness. A system of $n$ identical agents (finite state machines) performs a global task like electing a unique leader or determining the…
We give a simple deterministic $O(\log K / \log\log K)$ approximation algorithm for the Min-Max Selecting Items problem, where $K$ is the number of scenarios. While our main goal is simplicity, this result also improves over the previous…
Population protocols are networks of finite-state agents, interacting randomly, and updating their states using simple rules. Despite their extreme simplicity, these systems have been shown to cooperatively perform complex computational…
In this paper we study population protocols governed by the {\em random scheduler}, which uniformly at random selects pairwise interactions between $n$ agents. The main result of this paper is the first time and space optimal {\em exact…
We study the problem of minimizing the resource capacity of autonomous agents cooperating to achieve a shared task. More specifically, we consider high-level planning for a team of homogeneous agents that operate under resource constraints…
Population protocols are a well established model of distributed computation by mobile finite-state agents with very limited storage. A classical result establishes that population protocols compute exactly predicates definable in…
Memory-augmented neural networks consisting of a neural controller and an external memory have shown potentials in long-term sequential learning. Current RAM-like memory models maintain memory accessing every timesteps, thus they do not…
We consider \emph{plurality consensus} in a network of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node has one of $k$ opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the…
The population protocol model describes a network of anonymous agents that interact asynchronously in pairs chosen at random. Each agent starts in the same initial state $s$. We introduce the *dynamic size counting* problem: approximately…
The main contribution of this paper resides in providing novel algorithmic advances and analytical insights for the sequential hiring problem, a recently introduced dynamic optimization model where a firm adaptively fills a limited number…
We study here the problem of determining the majority type in an arbitrary connected network, each vertex of which has initially two possible types. The vertices may have a few additional possible states and can interact in pairs only if…
We consider the problem of finding patrol schedules for $k$ robots to visit a given set of $n$ sites in a metric space. Each robot has the same maximum speed and the goal is to minimize the weighted maximum latency of any site, where the…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…