83,784 research outputs found
Gossip vs. Markov Chains, and Randomness-Efficient Rumor Spreading
We study gossip algorithms for the rumor spreading problem which asks one
node to deliver a rumor to all nodes in an unknown network. We present the
first protocol for any expander graph with nodes such that, the
protocol informs every node in rounds with high probability, and
uses random bits in total. The runtime of our protocol is
tight, and the randomness requirement of random bits almost
matches the lower bound of random bits for dense graphs. We
further show that, for many graph families, polylogarithmic number of random
bits in total suffice to spread the rumor in rounds.
These results together give us an almost complete understanding of the
randomness requirement of this fundamental gossip process.
Our analysis relies on unexpectedly tight connections among gossip processes,
Markov chains, and branching programs. First, we establish a connection between
rumor spreading processes and Markov chains, which is used to approximate the
rumor spreading time by the mixing time of Markov chains. Second, we show a
reduction from rumor spreading processes to branching programs, and this
reduction provides a general framework to derandomize gossip processes. In
addition to designing rumor spreading protocols, these novel techniques may
have applications in studying parallel and multiple random walks, and
randomness complexity of distributed algorithms.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1304.135
A concentrator for static magnetic field
We propose a compact passive device as a super-concentrator to create an
extremely high uniform static magnetic field over 50T in a large
two-dimensional free space from a weak background magnetic field. Such an
amazing thing becomes possible for the first time, thanks to space-folded
transformation and metamaterials for static magnetic fields. Finite element
method (FEM) is utilized to verify the performance of the proposed device
Tight Bounds for Randomized Load Balancing on Arbitrary Network Topologies
We consider the problem of balancing load items (tokens) in networks.
Starting with an arbitrary load distribution, we allow nodes to exchange tokens
with their neighbors in each round. The goal is to achieve a distribution where
all nodes have nearly the same number of tokens.
For the continuous case where tokens are arbitrarily divisible, most load
balancing schemes correspond to Markov chains, whose convergence is fairly
well-understood in terms of their spectral gap. However, in many applications,
load items cannot be divided arbitrarily, and we need to deal with the discrete
case where the load is composed of indivisible tokens. This discretization
entails a non-linear behavior due to its rounding errors, which makes this
analysis much harder than in the continuous case.
We investigate several randomized protocols for different communication
models in the discrete case. As our main result, we prove that for any regular
network in the matching model, all nodes have the same load up to an additive
constant in (asymptotically) the same number of rounds as required in the
continuous case. This generalizes and tightens the previous best result, which
only holds for expander graphs, and demonstrates that there is almost no
difference between the discrete and continuous cases. Our results also provide
a positive answer to the question of how well discrete load balancing can be
approximated by (continuous) Markov chains, which has been posed by many
researchers.Comment: 74 pages, 4 figure
Dynamic Games with Almost Perfect Information
This paper aims to solve two fundamental problems on finite or infinite
horizon dynamic games with perfect or almost perfect information. Under some
mild conditions, we prove (1) the existence of subgame-perfect equilibria in
general dynamic games with almost perfect information, and (2) the existence of
pure-strategy subgame-perfect equilibria in perfect-information dynamic games
with uncertainty. Our results go beyond previous works on continuous dynamic
games in the sense that public randomization and the continuity requirement on
the state variables are not needed. As an illustrative application, a dynamic
stochastic oligopoly market with intertemporally dependent payoffs is
considered
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