Large Flocks of Small Birds: on the Minimal Size of Population Protocols

Authors Michael Blondin, Javier Esparza, Stefan Jaax



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Michael Blondin
Javier Esparza
Stefan Jaax

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Michael Blondin, Javier Esparza, and Stefan Jaax. Large Flocks of Small Birds: on the Minimal Size of Population Protocols. In 35th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 96, pp. 16:1-16:14, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2018.16

Abstract

Population protocols are a well established model of distributed computation by mobile finite-state agents with very limited storage. A classical result establishes that population protocols compute exactly predicates definable in Presburger arithmetic. We initiate the study of the minimal amount of memory required to compute a given predicate as a function of its size. We present results on the predicates x >= n for n \in N, and more generally on the predicates corresponding to systems of linear inequalities. We show that they can be computed by protocols with O(log n) states (or, more generally, logarithmic in the coefficients of the predicate), and that, surprisingly, some families of predicates can be computed by protocols with O(log log n) states. We give essentially matching lower bounds for the class of 1-aware protocols.
Keywords
  • Population protocols
  • Presburger arithmetic

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