research-article

Efficient Deterministic Leader Election for Programmable Matter

Authors:

Fabien Dufoulon,

William K. Moses Jr.Authors Info & Claims

PODC'21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Pages 103 - 113

https://doi.org/10.1145/3465084.3467900

Published: 23 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

It was suggested that a programmable matter system (composed of multiple computationally weak mobile particles) should remain connected at all times since otherwise, reconnection is difficult and may be impossible. At the same time, it was not clear that allowing the system to disconnect carried a significant advantage in terms of time complexity. We demonstrate for a fundamental task, that of leader election, an algorithm where the system disconnects and then reconnects automatically in a non-trivial way (particles can move far away from their former neighbors and later reconnect to others). Moreover, the runtime of the temporarily disconnecting deterministic leader election algorithm is linear in the diameter. Hence, the disconnecting -- reconnecting algorithm is as fast as previous randomized algorithms. When comparing to previous deterministic algorithms, we note that some of the previous work assumed weaker schedulers. Still, the runtime of all the previous deterministic algorithms that did not assume special shapes of the particle system (shapes with no holes) was at least quadratic in n, where n is the number of particles in the system. (Moreover, the new algorithm is even faster in some parameters than the deterministic algorithms that did assume special initial shapes.)

Since leader election is an important module in algorithms for various other tasks, the presented algorithm can be useful for speeding up other algorithms under the assumption of a strong scheduler. This leaves open the question: "can a deterministic algorithm be as fast as the randomized ones also under weaker schedulers?''

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (PODC21-016.mp4)

It was suggested that a programmable matter system (composed of multiple computationally weak mobile particles) should remain connected at all times since otherwise, reconnection is difficult and may be impossible. At the same time, it was not clear that allowing the system to disconnect carried a significant advantage in terms of time complexity. We demonstrate for a fundamental task, that of leader election, an algorithm where the system disconnects and then reconnects automatically in a non-trivial way (particles can move far away from their former neighbors and later reconnect to others). Moreover, the runtime of the temporarily disconnecting deterministic leader election algorithm is linear in the diameter. Hence, the disconnecting -- reconnecting algorithm is as fast as previous randomized algorithms.

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Cited By

Daymude JRicha AScheideler C(2023)The canonical amoebot model: algorithms and concurrency controlDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-023-00443-336:2(159-192)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00446-023-00443-3
Navarra APrencipe GBonini STracolli M(2023)Scattering with Programmable MatterAdvanced Information Networking and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-29056-5_22(236-247)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29056-5_22
Feldmann MPadalkin AScheideler CDolev S(2022)Coordinating Amoebots via Reconfigurable CircuitsJournal of Computational Biology10.1089/cmb.2021.036329:4(317-343)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1089/cmb.2021.0363

Index Terms

Efficient Deterministic Leader Election for Programmable Matter
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Mobile agents
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Distributed algorithms
      1. Self-organization

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cover image ACM Conferences

PODC'21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 2021

590 pages

ISBN:9781450385480

DOI:10.1145/3465084

General Chair:
Avery Miller
University of Manitoba, Canada
,
Program Chair:
Keren Censor-Hillel
Technion, Israel

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 July 2021

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Binational Science Foundation
Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Technion

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PODC '21

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PODC '21: ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 26 - 30, 2021

Virtual Event, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 740 of 2,477 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Daymude JRicha AScheideler C(2023)The canonical amoebot model: algorithms and concurrency controlDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-023-00443-336:2(159-192)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00446-023-00443-3
Navarra APrencipe GBonini STracolli M(2023)Scattering with Programmable MatterAdvanced Information Networking and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-29056-5_22(236-247)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29056-5_22
Feldmann MPadalkin AScheideler CDolev S(2022)Coordinating Amoebots via Reconfigurable CircuitsJournal of Computational Biology10.1089/cmb.2021.036329:4(317-343)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1089/cmb.2021.0363

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