We consider two variants of the classical gossip algorithm. The first variant
is a version of asynchronous stochastic approximation. We highlight a
fundamental difficulty associated with the classical asynchronous gossip
scheme, viz., that it may not converge to a desired average, and suggest an
alternative scheme based on reinforcement learning that has guaranteed
convergence to the desired average. We then discuss a potential application to
a wireless network setting with simultaneous link activation constraints. The
second variant is a gossip algorithm for distributed computation of the
Perron-Frobenius eigenvector of a nonnegative matrix. While the first variant
draws upon a reinforcement learning algorithm for an average cost controlled
Markov decision problem, the second variant draws upon a reinforcement learning
algorithm for risk-sensitive control. We then discuss potential applications of
the second variant to ranking schemes, reputation networks, and principal
component analysis.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. Minor revisio
