Many Random Walks Are Faster Than One

dc.creatorAlon, Noga
dc.creatorAvin, Chen
dc.creatorKoucky, Michal
dc.creatorKozma, Gady
dc.creatorLotker, Zvi
dc.creatorTuttle, Mark R.
dc.date2007-05-03
dc.date2007-11-20
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T08:43:31Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T08:43:31Z
dc.descriptionWe pose a new and intriguing question motivated by distributed computing regarding random walks on graphs: How long does it take for several independent random walks, starting from the same vertex, to cover an entire graph? We study the cover time - the expected time required to visit every node in a graph at least once - and we show that for a large collection of interesting graphs, running many random walks in parallel yields a speed-up in the cover time that is linear in the number of parallel walks. We demonstrate that an exponential speed-up is sometimes possible, but that some natural graphs allow only a logarithmic speed-up. A problem related to ours (in which the walks start from some probabilistic distribution on vertices) was previously studied in the context of space efficient algorithms for undirected s-t connectivity and our results yield, in certain cases, an improvement upon some of the earlier bounds.
dc.description15 pages
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/0705.0467
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/0705.0467
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/142342
dc.subjectProbability
dc.titleMany Random Walks Are Faster Than One
dc.typetext

Files

Collections