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We consider the standard population protocol model, where (a priori) indistinguishable and anonymous agents interact in pairs according to uniformly random scheduling. The self-stabilizing leader election problem requires the protocol to…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Janna Burman , Ho-Lin Chen , Hsueh-Ping Chen , David Doty , Thomas Nowak , Eric Severson , Chuan Xu

Population protocols are a popular model of distributed computing, in which randomly-interacting agents with little computational power cooperate to jointly perform computational tasks. Inspired by developments in molecular computation, and…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Dan Alistarh , James Aspnes , David Eisenstat , Rati Gelashvili , Ronald L. Rivest

The population protocol model is a computational model for passive mobile agents. We address the leader election problem, which determines a unique leader on arbitrary communication graphs starting from any configuration. Unfortunately,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Haruki Kanaya , Ryota Eguchi , Taisho Sasada , Michiko Inoue

For nearly two decades, population protocols have been extensively studied, yielding efficient solutions for central problems in distributed computing, including leader election, and majority computation, a predicate type in Presburger…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Leszek Gąsieniec , Tytus Grodzicki , Tomasz Jurdziński , Jakub Kowalski , Grzegorz Stachowiak

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Dan Alistarh , Rati Gelashvili

Population protocols are a distributed computation model in which a collection of anonymous, finite-state agents interact in randomly chosen pairs and update their states according to a fixed transition function. The computation is defined…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Michael Blondin , Michaël Cadilhac , Benjamin Courchesne , Lucie Guillou , Corto Mascle , Isa Vialard

In this paper we propose a novel consensus protocol for discrete-time multi-agent systems (MAS), which solves the dynamic consensus problem on the max value, i.e., the dynamic max-consensus problem. In the dynamic max-consensus problem to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-24 Diego Deplano , Mauro Franceschelli , Alessandro Giua

The model of population protocols refers to the growing in popularity theoretical framework suitable for studying pairwise interactions within a large collection of simple indistinguishable entities, frequently called agents. In this paper…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Leszek Gasieniec , Grzegorz Stachowiak

We investigate leader election problem via ranking within self-stabilising population protocols. In this scenario, the agent's state space comprises $n$ rank states and $x$ extra states. The initial configuration of $n$ agents consists of…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Leszek Gąsieniec , Tytus Grodzicki , Grzegorz Stachowiak

There has recently been a surge of interest in the computational and complexity properties of the population model, which assumes $n$ anonymous, computationally-bounded nodes, interacting at random, and attempting to jointly compute global…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Dan Alistarh , Martin Töpfer , Przemysław Uznański

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Gregory Schwartzman , Yuichi Sudo

The standard population protocol model assumes that when two agents interact, each observes the entire state of the other agent. We initiate the study of $\textit{message complexity}$ for population protocols, where the state of an agent is…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Talley Amir , James Aspnes , David Doty , Mahsa Eftekhari , Eric Severson

We consider the model of population protocols, which can be viewed as a sequence of random pairwise interactions of $n$ agents (nodes). We show population protocols for two problems: the leader election and the exact majority voting. The…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2017-05-04 Andreas Bilke , Colin Cooper , Robert Elsaesser , Tomasz Radzik

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Leszek Gąsieniec , Grzegorz Stachowiak , Przemysław Uznański

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Petra Berenbrink , Robert Elsässer , Tom Friedetzky , Dominik Kaaser , Peter Kling , Tomasz Radzik

The model of population protocols refers to a large collection of simple indistinguishable entities, frequently called {\em agents}. The agents communicate and perform computation through pairwise interactions. We study fast and space…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Leszek Gąsieniec , Grzegorz Stachowiak , Przemysław Uznański

We consider the problem of self-stabilizing leader election in the population model by Angluin, Aspnes, Diamadi, Fischer, and Peralta (JDistComp '06). The population model is a well-established and powerful model for asynchronous,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Henry Austin , Petra Berenbrink , Tom Friedetzky , Thorsten Götte , Lukas Hintze

Population protocols are a fundamental model in distributed computing, where many nodes with bounded memory and computational power have random pairwise interactions over time. This model has been studied in a rich body of literature aiming…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Simina Branzei , Yuval Peres

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Michael Blondin , François Ladouceur

We consider the plurality consensus problem among $n$ agents. Initially, each agent has one of $k$ different opinions. Agents choose random interaction partners and revise their state according to a fixed transition function, depending on…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Gregor Bankhamer , Petra Berenbrink , Felix Biermeier , Robert Elsässer , Hamed Hosseinpour , Dominik Kaaser , Peter Kling