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Searching for an Eventually-Emerging Black Hole in Rings

Authors François Bonnet , Quentin Bramas , Anissa Lamani

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms
  • Computing methodologies → Mobile agents
Keywords
  • Black hole search
  • mobile agent
  • distributed computing

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Abstract

We study a novel variant of the Black Hole Search (BHS) problem where the black hole, a node that silently destroys visiting agents, can appear at any time during execution, rather than being present initially, as is assumed in all previous work. Our focus is on ring networks, and we examine this variant of the BHS problem under various assumptions, including whether the ring size is known and whether agents can use pebbles for marking nodes. 
For synchronous agents, we provide four solutions: (1) a 4-agent algorithm for rings without additional assumptions, (2) a 3-agent algorithm assuming known ring size, (3) a 3-agent algorithm using pebbles, and (4) a 3-agent solution without additional assumptions but having a quadratic time complexity. For asynchronous agents, we develop two algorithms: one using n agents without additional assumptions, and another using only 4 agents with pebbles.

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François Bonnet, Quentin Bramas, and Anissa Lamani. Searching for an Eventually-Emerging Black Hole in Rings. In 5th Symposium on Algorithmic Foundations of Dynamic Networks (SAND 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 373, pp. 18:1-18:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SAND.2026.18

Author Details

François Bonnet
  • Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Quentin Bramas
  • University of Strasbourg, CNRS, ICUBE, France
Anissa Lamani
  • University of Strasbourg, CNRS, ICUBE, France

Funding

  • Bramas, Quentin: This work was partially funded by the ANR project TURFU-NET, ref. ANR-24-IAS1-0001.

Supplementary Materials

References

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