We study a plurality-consensus process in which each of n anonymous agents of a communication network initially supports a color chosen from the set [k]. Then, in every round, each agent can revise his color according to the colors currently held by a random sample of his neighbors. It is assumed that the initial color configuration exhibits a sufficiently large bias s towards a fixed plurality color, that is, the number of nodes supporting the plurality color exceeds the number of nodes supporting any other color by s additional nodes. The goal is having the process to converge to the stable configuration in which all nodes support the initial plurality. We consider a basic model in which the network is a clique and the update rule (called here the 3-majority dynamics) of the process is the following: each agent looks at the colors of three random neighbors and then applies the majority rule (breaking ties uniformly). We prove that the process converges in time O(min{k,(n/logn)1/3}logn) with high probability, provided that s⩾cmin{2k,(n/logn)1/3}nlogn−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−√. We then prove that our upper bound above is tight as long as k⩽(n/logn)1/4. This fact implies an exponential time-gap between the plurality-consensus process and the median process (see Doerr et al. in Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on parallelism in algorithms and architectures (SPAA’11), pp 149–158. ACM, 2011). A natural question is whether looking at more (than three) random neighbors can significantly speed up the process. We provide a negative answer to this question: in particular, we show that samples of polylogarithmic size can speed up the process by a polylogarithmic factor only.
Simple dynamics for plurality consensus
Trevisan, Luca
Membro del Collaboration Group
2017
Abstract
We study a plurality-consensus process in which each of n anonymous agents of a communication network initially supports a color chosen from the set [k]. Then, in every round, each agent can revise his color according to the colors currently held by a random sample of his neighbors. It is assumed that the initial color configuration exhibits a sufficiently large bias s towards a fixed plurality color, that is, the number of nodes supporting the plurality color exceeds the number of nodes supporting any other color by s additional nodes. The goal is having the process to converge to the stable configuration in which all nodes support the initial plurality. We consider a basic model in which the network is a clique and the update rule (called here the 3-majority dynamics) of the process is the following: each agent looks at the colors of three random neighbors and then applies the majority rule (breaking ties uniformly). We prove that the process converges in time O(min{k,(n/logn)1/3}logn) with high probability, provided that s⩾cmin{2k,(n/logn)1/3}nlogn−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−√. We then prove that our upper bound above is tight as long as k⩽(n/logn)1/4. This fact implies an exponential time-gap between the plurality-consensus process and the median process (see Doerr et al. in Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on parallelism in algorithms and architectures (SPAA’11), pp 149–158. ACM, 2011). A natural question is whether looking at more (than three) random neighbors can significantly speed up the process. We provide a negative answer to this question: in particular, we show that samples of polylogarithmic size can speed up the process by a polylogarithmic factor only.
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