The computational power of population protocols
Loading...
Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Description
We consider the model of population protocols introduced by Angluin et al., in which anonymous finite-state agents stably compute a predicate of the multiset of their inputs via two-way interactions in the all-pairs family of communication networks. We prove that all predicates stably computable in this model (and certain generalizations of it) are semilinear, answering a central open question about the power of the model. Removing the assumption of two-way interaction, we also consider several variants of the model in which agents communicate by anonymous message-passing where the recipient of each message is chosen by an adversary and the sender is not identified to the recipient. These one-way models are distinguished by whether messages are delivered immediately or after a delay, whether a sender can record that it has sent a message, and whether a recipient can queue incoming messages, refusing to accept new messages until it has had a chance to send out messages of its own. We characterize the classes of predicates stably computable in each of these one-way models using natural subclasses of the semilinear predicates.
Combined version of OPODIS 2005 and PODC 2006 papers; submitted to Distributed Computing
Combined version of OPODIS 2005 and PODC 2006 papers; submitted to Distributed Computing