English
Related papers

Related papers: Breaking through the $\Omega(n)$-space barrier: Po…

200 papers

Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Mikhail Raskin

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Stav Ben-Nun , Tsvi Kopelowitz , Matan Kraus , Ely Porat

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

We consider a population of $n$ agents which communicate with each other in a decentralized manner, through random pairwise interactions. One or more agents in the population may act as authoritative sources of information, and the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-30 Bartlomiej Dudek , Adrian Kosowski

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

The population protocol model describes a network of $n$ anonymous agents who cannot control with whom they interact. The agents collectively solve some computational problem through random pairwise interactions, each agent updating its own…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-10-25 David Doty , Mahsa Eftekhari

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 collection of anonymous agents, modeled by finite automata, interact in pairs…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-06-18 Olivier Bournez , Jérémie Chalopin , Johanne Cohen , Xavier Koegler

We study uniform population protocols: networks of anonymous agents whose pairwise interactions are chosen at random, where each agent uses an identical transition algorithm that does not depend on the population size $n$. Many existing…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-07-30 David Doty , Mahsa Eftekhari

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,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-15 David Doty , Mahsa Eftekhari , Othon Michail , Paul G. Spirakis , Michail Theofilatos

The population protocol model describes collections of distributed agents that interact in pairs to solve a common task. We consider a dynamic variant of this prominent model, where we assume that an adversary may change the population size…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Dominik Kaaser , Maximilian Lohmann

We study exact majority consensus in the population protocol model. In this model, the system is described by a graph $G = (V,E)$ with $n$ nodes, and in each time step, a scheduler samples uniformly at random a pair of adjacent nodes to…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Joel Rybicki , Jakob Solnerzik , Olivier Stietel , Robin Vacus

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

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

This paper revisits a fundamental distributed computing problem in the population protocol model. Provided $n$ agents each starting with an input color in $[k]$, the relative majority problem asks to find the predominant color. In the…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Tom-Lukas Breitkopf , Julien Dallot , Antoine El-Hayek , Stefan Schmid

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Dan Alistarh , Rati Gelashvili , Joel Rybicki

We study the problems of leader election and population size counting for population protocols: networks of finite-state anonymous agents that interact randomly under a uniform random scheduler. We show a protocol for leader election that…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Othon Michail , Paul G. Spirakis , Michail Theofilatos

The Population Protocol model is a distributed model that concerns systems of very weak computational entities that cannot control the way they interact. The model of Network Constructors is a variant of Population Protocols capable of…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-12-10 Othon Michail , Paul G. Spirakis

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 revisit the majority problem in the population protocol communication model, as first studied by Angluin et al. (Distributed Computing 2008). We consider a more general version of this problem known as plurality consensus, which has…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Antoine El-Hayek , Robert Elsässer , Stefan Schmid

The population protocol model introduced by Angluin et al. in 2006 offers a theoretical framework for designing and analyzing distributed algorithms among limited-resource mobile agents. While the original population protocol model…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Talley Amir , James Aspnes