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arXiv · 1707.05135

A Tight Analysis of the Parallel Undecided-State Dynamics with Two Colors

Andrea E. F. Clementi·Luciano Gualà·Francesco Pasquale·Giacomo Scornavacca·Emanuele Natale·Mohsen Ghaffari
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Abstract

The \emph{Undecided-State Dynamics} is a well-known protocol for distributed consensus. We analyze it in the parallel \pull\ communication model on the complete graph for the \emph{binary} case (every node can either support one of \emph{two} possible colors, or be in the undecided state). An interesting open question is whether this dynamics \emph{always} (i.e., starting from an arbitrary initial configuration) reaches consensus \emph{quickly} (i.e., within a polylogarithmic number of rounds) in a complete graph with $n$ nodes. Previous work in this setting only considers initial color configurations with no undecided nodes and a large \emph{bias} (i.e., $\Theta(n)$) towards the majority color. In this paper we present an \textit{unconditional} analysis of the Undecided-State Dynamics that answers to the above question in the affirmative. We prove that, starting from \textit{any} initial configuration, the process reaches a monochromatic configuration within $O(\log n)$ rounds, with high probability. This bound turns out to be tight. Our analysis also shows that, if the initial configuration has bias $\Omega(\sqrt{n\log n})$, then the dynamics converges toward the initial majority color, with high probability.

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Andrea E. F. Clementi, Luciano Gualà, Francesco Pasquale, Giacomo Scornavacca, Emanuele Natale, Mohsen Ghaffari. 2017-07-17. A Tight Analysis of the Parallel Undecided-State Dynamics with Two Colors. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.05135

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