The Distributed Computing Column by Stefan Schmid Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna Währinger Strasse 29, AT - 1090 Vienna
[email protected] In this issue of the distributed computing column, Robert Elsässer and Tomasz Radzik provide a review of interesting recent models and results for population protocols, with a focus on exact majority and leader election. Many thanks to the authors for their contribution and enjoy! PS: For those dear readers interested in learning even more about population protocols, I would like to point out that it happens that the September 2018 issue of the SIGACT News column also features an overview article on population protocols, by Alistarh and Gelashvili, revolving around models where agents in the system can have more than a constant amount of local memory. Recent Results in Population Protocols for Exact Majority and Leader Election Robert Elsässer Department of Computer Sciences University of Salzburg
[email protected] Tomasz Radzik Department of Infomatics King’s College London
[email protected] Abstract Population protocols act in a simple and natural framework to solve fun- damental problems in networks. Given a population of n anonymous nodes (agents), a scheduler chooses in discrete time steps two nodes for interac- tion, which then exchange their current states and perform a so called state transition. We focus on the random scheduler, which selects in each step two nodes uniformly at random for interaction, and on the problems of exact ma- jority and leader election. In exact majority, initially the nodes possess one of two opinions, A or B, and the population is required to converge to a con- figuration, in which every node has the opinion of the initial majority.