Related papers: Population Protocols for Exact Plurality Consensus…
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…
Population protocols are a model of computation in which an arbitrary number of anonymous finite-memory agents are interacting in order to decide by stable consensus a predicate. In this paper, we focus on the counting predicates that asks,…
We study a \emph{Plurality-Consensus} process in which each of $n$ anonymous agents of a communication network initially supports an opinion (a color chosen from a finite set $[k]$). Then, in every (synchronous) round, each agent can revise…
In this work, we analyze the performance of a simple majority-rule protocol solving a fundamental coordination problem in distributed systems - \emph{binary majority consensus}, in the presence of probabilistic message loss. Using…
Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly important in entity resolution tasks due to their inherent complexity such as clustering of images and natural language processing. Humans can provide more insightful information for these difficult…
The model of population protocols provides a universal platform to study distributed processes driven by pairwise interactions of anonymous agents. While population protocols present an elegant and robust model for randomized distributed…
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…
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…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation in which finite-state agents interact randomly in pairs. A protocol decides for any initial configuration whether it satisfies a fixed property, specified as a predicate on the set…
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…
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…
We consider the problem of counting the population size in the population model. In this model, we are given a distributed system of $n$ identical agents which interact in pairs with the goal to solve a common task. In each time step, the…
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…
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…
We study distributed plurality consensus among $n$ nodes, each of which initially holds one of $k$ opinions. The goal is to eventually agree on the initially dominant opinion. We consider an asynchronous communication model in which each…
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,…
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…
We revisit the classic problem of spreading a piece of information in a group of $n$ fully connected processors. By suitably adding a small dose of randomness to the protocol of Gasienic and Pelc (1996), we derive for the first time…
We study the Consensus problem among $n$ agents, defined as follows. Initially, each agent holds one of two possible opinions. The goal is to reach a consensus configuration in which every agent shares the same opinion. To this end, agents…
We study consensus processes on the complete graph of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node supports one from up to n opinions. Nodes randomly and in parallel sample the opinions of constant many nodes. Based on these samples, they use an update…