Related papers: The Complexity of Verifying Population Protocols
Population protocols are a class of algorithms for modeling distributed computation in networks of finite-state agents communicating through pairwise interactions. Their suitability for analyzing numerous chemical processes has motivated…
Population protocols have been introduced as a model of sensor networks consisting of very limited mobile agents with no control over their own movement. A population protocol corresponds to a collection of anonymous agents, modeled by…
I survey our recent work on the verification of population protocols and their state complexity.
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…
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…
We study here the dynamics (and stability) of Probabilistic Population Protocols, via the differential equations approach. We provide a quite general model and we show that it includes the model of Angluin et. al. in the case of very large…
We present efficient and practical algorithms for a large, distributed system of processors to achieve reliable computations in a secure manner. Specifically, we address the problem of computing a general function of several private inputs…
Let $G$ be a graph on $n$ nodes. In the stochastic population protocol model, a collection of $n$ indistinguishable, resource-limited nodes collectively solve tasks via pairwise interactions. In each interaction, two randomly chosen…
We study population protocols, a model of distributed computing appropriate for modeling well-mixed chemical reaction networks and other physical systems where agents exchange information in pairwise interactions, but have no control over…
We focus on a uniform partition problem in a population protocol model. The uniform partition problem aims to divide a population into k groups of the same size, where k is a given positive integer. In the case of k=2 (called uniform…
We consider the new extension of population protocols with unordered data and show that the corresponding well-specification problem and therefore also other verification problems are undecidable.
The effort to understand network systems in increasing detail has resulted in a diversity of methods designed to extract their large-scale structure from data. Unfortunately, many of these methods yield diverging descriptions of the same…
Population protocols form a well-established model of computation of passively mobile anonymous agents with constant-size memory. It is well known that population protocols compute Presburger-definable predicates, such as absolute majority…
We consider the population protocol model where indistinguishable state machines, referred to as agents, communicate in pairs. The communication graph specifies potential interactions (\ie communication) between agent pairs. This paper…
We study population protocols, a model of distributed computing appropriate for modeling well-mixed chemical reaction networks and other physical systems where agents exchange information in pairwise interactions, but have no control over…
In this work, we initiate the study of \emph{smoothed analysis} of population protocols. We consider a population protocol model where an adaptive adversary dictates the interactions between agents, but with probability $p$ every such…
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…
We introduce immediate observation Petri nets, a class of interest in the study of population protocols (a model of distributed computation), and enzymatic chemical networks. In these areas, relevant analysis questions translate into…
In this work we analyze the problem of, given the probability distribution of a population, questioning an unknown individual that is representative of the distribution so that our uncertainty about certain characteristics is significantly…
Population protocols are a formal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions in which the interacting…