Distributed Rational Consensus

The \textit{consensus} is a very important problem in distributed computing, where among the $n$ players, the honest players try to come to an agreement even in the presence of $t$ malicious players. In game theoretic environment, \textit{the group choice problem} is similar to the \textit{rational consensus problem}, where every player $p_i$ prefers come to consensus on his value $v_i$ or to a value which is as close to it as possible. All the players need to come to an agreement on one value by amalgamating individual preferences to form a group or social choice. In rational consensus problem, there are no malicious players. We consider the rational consensus problem in the presence of few malicious players. The players are assumed to be rational rather than honest and there exist few malicious players among them. Every rational player primarily prefers to come to consensus on his value and secondarily, prefers to come to consensus on other player\u27s value. In other words, if $w_1$, $w_2$ and $w_3$ are the payoffs obtained when $p_i$ comes to consensus on his value, $p_i$ comes to consensus on other\u27s value and $p_i$ does not come to consensus respectively, then $w_1 > w_2 > w_3$. We name it as \textit{distributed rational consensus problem} DRC. The players can have two values, either 1 or 0, i.e binary consensus. The rational majority is defined as number of players, who wants to agree on one particular value, and they are more than half of the rational players. Similarly rational minority can be defined. We have considered EIG protocol, and characterized the rational behaviour, and shown that EIG protocol will not work in rational environment. We have proved that, there exists no protocol, which solves distributed consensus problem in fixed running time, where players have knowledge of other players values during the protocol. This proof is based on Maskin\u27s monotonicity property. The good news is, if the players do not have knowledge about other players values, then it can be solved. This can be achieved by verifiable rational secret sharing, where players do not exchange their values directly, but as pieces of it

Intercultural ethics and dialogic recognition to resolve the conflict between the state of chile - mapuche ethnicity: for a look at the possibilities of the others dignity.

El presente trabajo configura una búsqueda de soluciones posibles al conflicto interétnico vigente entre el pueblo Mapuche y el Estado de Chile desde una perspectiva del reconocimiento y de relaciones dialógicas que conduzcan a un consenso intercultural, cuyo objetivo es desarrollar los fundamentos teóricos y prácticos necesarios para delinear una mirada ética del conflicto, que pueda plasmar una comunidad humana sin humillación, degradación, no reconocimiento, evitando el daño y la crueldad.The following report sets a search for possible solutions to inter ethnic conflict from a recognition perspective and dialogical relations between the Mapuche ethnicity and the state of Chile to guide a rational consensus. The objective is to develop the practical and theoretical foundations necessary to delineate an inter cultural and ethical look at the conflict, which serves to apply a human community without humiliation, degradation, non-recognition, which avoids the damage and cruelty. Palabras clave: Reconocimiento, conflicto, acuerdo general racional, ética. Key words: Recognition, conflict, rational consensus, ethics

The Fundamental Problem of Philosophy: Its Point

The fundamental problem of philosophy is whether doing it has any point, since if it does not have any point, there is no reason to do it. It is suggested that the intrinsic point of doing philosophy is to establish a rational consensus about what the answers to its main questions are. But it seems that this cannot be accomplished because philosophical arguments are bound to be inconclusive. Still, philosophical research generates an increasing number of finer grained distinctions in terms of which we try to conceptualize reality, and this is a sort of progress. But if, as is likely, our arguments do not suffice to decide between these alternatives, our personalities might slip in to do so. Our philosophy will then express our personality. This could provide philosophy with a point for us. If some of our conclusions have practical import, philosophy could have the further point of giving us something by which we can live

The Discourse Ethics Alternative to Rust v. Sullivan

Legal theorists in the United States should pay more attention to Jiirgen Habermas. His theory of discourse ethics provides us with an enriched understanding of the term normative validity. Discourse ethics is concerned ...with the grounding of normativity . . .; its central focus is the . . . specification of appropriate validation procedures. \u27 Once participants in political discourse agree on validation procedures, they are then in a position to achieve a fully rational consensus about normatively right laws that are in everyone\u27s best interests

Rational Fair Consensus in the GOSSIP Model

The \emph{rational fair consensus problem} can be informally defined as follows. Consider a network of $n$ (selfish) \emph{rational agents}, each of them initially supporting a \emph{color} chosen from a finite set $\Sigma$. The goal is to design a protocol that leads the network to a stable monochromatic configuration (i.e. a consensus) such that the probability that the winning color is $c$ is equal to the fraction of the agents that initially support $c$, for any $c \in \Sigma$. Furthermore, this fairness property must be guaranteed (with high probability) even in presence of any fixed \emph{coalition} of rational agents that may deviate from the protocol in order to increase the winning probability of their supported colors. A protocol having this property, in presence of coalitions of size at most $t$, is said to be a \emph{whp\,-$t$-strong equilibrium}. We investigate, for the first time, the rational fair consensus problem in the GOSSIP communication model where, at every round, every agent can actively contact at most one neighbor via a \emph{push$/$pull} operation. We provide a randomized GOSSIP protocol that, starting from any initial color configuration of the complete graph, achieves rational fair consensus within $O(\log n)$ rounds using messages of $O(\log^2n)$ size, w.h.p. More in details, we prove that our protocol is a whp\,-$t$-strong equilibrium for any $t = o(n/\log n)$ and, moreover, it tolerates worst-case permanent faults provided that the number of non-faulty agents is $\Omega(n)$. As far as we know, our protocol is the first solution which avoids any all-to-all communication, thus resulting in $o(n^2)$ message complexity.Comment: Accepted at IPDPS'1

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and if so, what ‎kind of ‎consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference ‎that a ‎theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking ‎into ‎consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of ‎the ‎consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of ‎consensus ‎formation.

A distributed auctioneer for resource allocation in decentralized systems

In decentralized systems, nodes often need to coordinate to access shared resources in a fair manner. One approach to perform such arbitration is to rely on auction mechanisms. Although there is an extensive literature that studies auctions, most of these works assume the existence of a central, trusted auctioneer. Unfortunately, in fully decentralized systems, where the nodes that need to cooperate operate under separate spheres of control, such central trusted entity may not exist. Notable examples of such decentralized systems include community networks, clouds of clouds, cooperative nano data centres, among others. In this paper, we make theoretical and practical contributions to distribute the role of the auctioneer. From the theoretical perspective, we propose a framework of distributed simulations of the auctioneer that are Nash equilibria resilient to coalitions and asynchrony. From the practical perspective, our protocols leverage the distributed nature of the simulations to parallelise the execution. We have implemented a prototype that instantiates the framework for bandwidth allocation in community networks, and evaluated it in a real distributed setting.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft