24 research outputs found
A general lower bound for collaborative tree exploration
We consider collaborative graph exploration with a set of agents. All
agents start at a common vertex of an initially unknown graph and need to
collectively visit all other vertices. We assume agents are deterministic,
vertices are distinguishable, moves are simultaneous, and we allow agents to
communicate globally. For this setting, we give the first non-trivial lower
bounds that bridge the gap between small () and large () teams of agents. Remarkably, our bounds tightly connect to existing results
in both domains.
First, we significantly extend a lower bound of
by Dynia et al. on the competitive ratio of a collaborative tree exploration
strategy to the range for any . Second,
we provide a tight lower bound on the number of agents needed for any
competitive exploration algorithm. In particular, we show that any
collaborative tree exploration algorithm with agents has a
competitive ratio of , while Dereniowski et al. gave an algorithm
with agents and competitive ratio , for any
and with denoting the diameter of the graph. Lastly, we
show that, for any exploration algorithm using agents, there exist
trees of arbitrarily large height that require rounds, and we
provide a simple algorithm that matches this bound for all trees
Collaborative search on the plane without communication
We generalize the classical cow-path problem [7, 14, 38, 39] into a question
that is relevant for collective foraging in animal groups. Specifically, we
consider a setting in which k identical (probabilistic) agents, initially
placed at some central location, collectively search for a treasure in the
two-dimensional plane. The treasure is placed at a target location by an
adversary and the goal is to find it as fast as possible as a function of both
k and D, where D is the distance between the central location and the target.
This is biologically motivated by cooperative, central place foraging such as
performed by ants around their nest. In this type of search there is a strong
preference to locate nearby food sources before those that are further away.
Our focus is on trying to find what can be achieved if communication is limited
or altogether absent. Indeed, to avoid overlaps agents must be highly dispersed
making communication difficult. Furthermore, if agents do not commence the
search in synchrony then even initial communication is problematic. This holds,
in particular, with respect to the question of whether the agents can
communicate and conclude their total number, k. It turns out that the knowledge
of k by the individual agents is crucial for performance. Indeed, it is a
straightforward observation that the time required for finding the treasure is
(D + D 2 /k), and we show in this paper that this bound can be matched
if the agents have knowledge of k up to some constant approximation. We present
an almost tight bound for the competitive penalty that must be paid, in the
running time, if agents have no information about k. Specifically, on the
negative side, we show that in such a case, there is no algorithm whose
competitiveness is O(log k). On the other hand, we show that for every constant
\epsilon \textgreater{} 0, there exists a rather simple uniform search
algorithm which is -competitive. In addition, we give
a lower bound for the setting in which agents are given some estimation of k.
As a special case, this lower bound implies that for any constant \epsilon
\textgreater{} 0, if each agent is given a (one-sided)
-approximation to k, then the competitiveness is (log k).
Informally, our results imply that the agents can potentially perform well
without any knowledge of their total number k, however, to further improve,
they must be given a relatively good approximation of k. Finally, we propose a
uniform algorithm that is both efficient and extremely simple suggesting its
relevance for actual biological scenarios
Time Versus Cost Tradeoffs for Deterministic Rendezvous in Networks
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of a network at possibly
different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as
. Agents move in synchronous rounds. Each agent has a
distinct integer label from the set . Two main efficiency
measures of rendezvous are its (the number of rounds until the
meeting) and its (the total number of edge traversals). We
investigate tradeoffs between these two measures. A natural benchmark for both
time and cost of rendezvous in a network is the number of edge traversals
needed for visiting all nodes of the network, called the exploration time.
Hence we express the time and cost of rendezvous as functions of an upper bound
on the time of exploration (where and a corresponding exploration
procedure are known to both agents) and of the size of the label space. We
present two natural rendezvous algorithms. Algorithm has cost
(and, in fact, a version of this algorithm for the model where the
agents start simultaneously has cost exactly ) and time . Algorithm
has both time and cost . Our main contributions are
lower bounds showing that, perhaps surprisingly, these two algorithms capture
the tradeoffs between time and cost of rendezvous almost tightly. We show that
any deterministic rendezvous algorithm of cost asymptotically (i.e., of
cost ) must have time . On the other hand, we show that any
deterministic rendezvous algorithm with time complexity must have
cost
Trade-offs between Selection Complexity and Performance when Searching the Plane without Communication
We consider the ANTS problem [Feinerman et al.] in which a group of agents
collaboratively search for a target in a two-dimensional plane. Because this
problem is inspired by the behavior of biological species, we argue that in
addition to studying the {\em time complexity} of solutions it is also
important to study the {\em selection complexity}, a measure of how likely a
given algorithmic strategy is to arise in nature due to selective pressures. In
more detail, we propose a new selection complexity metric , defined for
algorithm such that , where is
the number of memory bits used by each agent and bounds the fineness of
available probabilities (agents use probabilities of at least ). In
this paper, we study the trade-off between the standard performance metric of
speed-up, which measures how the expected time to find the target improves with
, and our new selection metric.
In particular, consider agents searching for a treasure located at
(unknown) distance from the origin (where is sub-exponential in ).
For this problem, we identify as a crucial threshold for our
selection complexity metric. We first prove a new upper bound that achieves a
near-optimal speed-up of for . In particular, for , the speed-up is
asymptotically optimal. By comparison, the existing results for this problem
[Feinerman et al.] that achieve similar speed-up require . We then show that this threshold is tight by describing a
lower bound showing that if , then
with high probability the target is not found within moves per
agent. Hence, there is a sizable gap to the straightforward
lower bound in this setting.Comment: appears in PODC 201