Related papers: Population Protocols for Exact Plurality Consensus…
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…
In several settings (e.g., sensor networks and social networks), nodes of a graph are equipped with initial opinions, and the goal is to estimate the average of these opinions using local operations. A natural algorithm to achieve this is…
The {\em parallel time} of a population protocol is defined as the average number of required interactions that an agent in the protocol participates, i.e., the quotient between the total number of interactions required by the protocol and…
The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only…
We propose a new protocol solving the fundamental problem of disseminating a piece of information to all members of a group of n players. It builds upon the classical randomized rumor spreading protocol and several extensions. The main…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
We propose a self-stabilizing leader election (SS-LE) protocol on ring networks in the population protocol model. Given a rough knowledge $\psi = \lceil \log n \rceil + O(1)$ on the population size $n$, the proposed protocol lets the…
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…
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 the problem of finding a small subset of items that is \emph{agreeable} to all agents, meaning that all agents value the subset at least as much as its complement. Previous work has shown worst-case bounds, over all instances with…
Population protocols are a distributed computing model appropriate for describing massive numbers of agents with limited computational power. A population protocol "has an initial leader" if every valid initial configuration contains a…
Error-correcting codes are efficient methods for handling \emph{noisy} communication channels in the context of technological networks. However, such elaborate methods differ a lot from the unsophisticated way biological entities are…
We study the problem of how to coordinate the actions of independent agents in a distributed system where message arrival times are unbounded, but are determined by an exponential probability distribution. Asynchronous protocols executed in…
We consider the \emph{approximate minimum selection} problem in presence of \emph{independent random comparison faults}. This problem asks to select one of the smallest $k$ elements in a linearly-ordered collection of $n$ elements by only…
Given a random variable $O \in \mathbb{R}$ and a set of experts $E$, we describe a method for finding a subset of experts $S \subseteq E$ whose aggregated opinion best predicts the outcome of $O$. Therefore, the problem can be regarded as a…
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,…
We provide a game-theoretic analysis of consensus, assuming that processes are controlled by rational agents and may fail by crashing. We consider agents that \emph{care only about consensus}: that is, (a) an agent's utility depends only on…
A primary goal of online deliberation platforms is to identify ideas that are broadly agreeable to a community of users through their expressed preferences. Yet, consensus elicitation should ideally extend beyond the specific statements…
Majority vote is a basic method for amplifying correct outcomes that is widely used in computer science and beyond. While it can amplify the correctness of a quantum device with classical output, the analogous procedure for quantum output…
Many statistical experiments involve comparing multiple population groups. For example, a public opinion poll may ask which of several political candidates commands the most support; a social scientific survey may report the most common of…