2026-07-21T03:11:28Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:12882 2024-03-06T10:50:59Z ddc:004 open_access

Simulating Population Protocols in Sub-Constant Time per Interaction Berenbrink, Petra Hammer, David Kaaser, Dominik Meyer, Ulrich Penschuck, Manuel Tran, Hung Population Protocols Simulation Random Sampling Dynamic Alias Table We consider the efficient simulation of population protocols. In the population model, we are given a system of n agents modeled as identical finite-state machines. In each step, two agents are selected uniformly at random to interact by updating their states according to a common transition function. We empirically and analytically analyze two classes of simulators for this model. First, we consider sequential simulators executing one interaction after the other. Key to the performance of these simulators is the data structure storing the agents' states. For our analysis, we consider plain arrays, binary search trees, and a novel Dynamic Alias Table data structure. Secondly, we consider batch processing to efficiently update the states of multiple independent agents in one step. For many protocols considered in literature, our simulator requires amortized sub-constant time per interaction and is fast in practice: given a fixed time budget, the implementation of our batched simulator is able to simulate population protocols several orders of magnitude larger compared to the sequential competitors, and can carry out 2^50 interactions among the same number of agents in less than 400s. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Petra Berenbrink and David Hammer and Dominik Kaaser and Ulrich Meyer and Manuel Penschuck and Hung Tran 2020 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 173, 28th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2020) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.16 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-128827 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2020.16 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode