18 research outputs found
The Distributed Multiple Voting Problem
A networked set of agents holding binary opinions does not seem to be able to compute its majority opinion by means of local binary interactions only. However, the majority problem can be solved using two or more bits, instead of one [1]. Pairs of agents asynchronously exchange their states and update them according to a voting automaton. This paper presents binary voting automata as well as solutions to the multiple voting problem, where agents can vote for one candidate among |C| >= 2 candidates and need to determine the majority vote. The voting automata are derived from the pairwise gossip algorithm, which computes averages. In the binary case (|C| = 2), we focus on averages in dimension 1, but in the multiple case (|C| >= 2) we quantize gossip in dimension |C | - 1, which is larger than or equal to 1. We show in particular that a consensus on majority can be reached using 15 possible states (4 bits) for the ternary voting problem, and using 100 possible states (7 bits) for the quaternary voting problem
On the Necessary Memory to Compute the Plurality in Multi-Agent Systems
We consider the Relative-Majority Problem (also known as Plurality), in
which, given a multi-agent system where each agent is initially provided an
input value out of a set of possible ones, each agent is required to
eventually compute the input value with the highest frequency in the initial
configuration. We consider the problem in the general Population Protocols
model in which, given an underlying undirected connected graph whose nodes
represent the agents, edges are selected by a globally fair scheduler.
The state complexity that is required for solving the Plurality Problem
(i.e., the minimum number of memory states that each agent needs to have in
order to solve the problem), has been a long-standing open problem. The best
protocol so far for the general multi-valued case requires polynomial memory:
Salehkaleybar et al. (2015) devised a protocol that solves the problem by
employing states per agent, and they conjectured their upper bound
to be optimal. On the other hand, under the strong assumption that agents
initially agree on a total ordering of the initial input values, Gasieniec et
al. (2017), provided an elegant logarithmic-memory plurality protocol.
In this work, we refute Salehkaleybar et al.'s conjecture, by providing a
plurality protocol which employs states per agent. Central to our
result is an ordering protocol which allows to leverage on the plurality
protocol by Gasieniec et al., of independent interest. We also provide a
-state lower bound on the necessary memory to solve the problem,
proving that the Plurality Problem cannot be solved within the mere memory
necessary to encode the output.Comment: 14 pages, accepted at CIAC 201
Design and Analysis of Distributed Averaging with Quantized Communication
Consider a network whose nodes have some initial values, and it is desired to
design an algorithm that builds on neighbor to neighbor interactions with the
ultimate goal of convergence to the average of all initial node values or to
some value close to that average. Such an algorithm is called generically
"distributed averaging," and our goal in this paper is to study the performance
of a subclass of deterministic distributed averaging algorithms where the
information exchange between neighboring nodes (agents) is subject to uniform
quantization. With such quantization, convergence to the precise average cannot
be achieved in general, but the convergence would be to some value close to it,
called quantized consensus. Using Lyapunov stability analysis, we characterize
the convergence properties of the resulting nonlinear quantized system. We show
that in finite time and depending on initial conditions, the algorithm will
either cause all agents to reach a quantized consensus where the consensus
value is the largest quantized value not greater than the average of their
initial values, or will lead all variables to cycle in a small neighborhood
around the average. In the latter case, we identify tight bounds for the size
of the neighborhood and we further show that the error can be made arbitrarily
small by adjusting the algorithm's parameters in a distributed manner