On the algebraic numbers computable by some generalized Ehrenfest urns

Marie Albenque,Lucas Gerin

doi:10.46298/dmtcs.565

Abstract

This article deals with some stochastic population protocols, motivated by theoretical aspects of distributed computing. We modelize the problem by a large urn of black and white balls from which at every time unit a fixed number of balls are drawn and their colors are changed according to the number of black balls among them. When the time and the number of balls both tend to infinity the proportion of black balls converges to an algebraic number. We prove that, surprisingly enough, not every algebraic number can be ''computed'' this way.

Highlights

The aim of this article is to tackle some questions of distributed computing in theoretical computer science, from a statistical mechanics standpoint
There is a clear analogy with statistical mechanics, in which physical systems are well described at a macroscopic level, while molecular-level phenomena seem chaotic
We study the sequence of the proportions of black balls in the urn X(n) :=

Summary

Introduction

The aim of this article is to tackle some questions of distributed computing in theoretical computer science, from a statistical mechanics standpoint. Distributed computing deals with large computing systems using many small processing elements. These small elements are thought as elementary elements in a complex network whose interactions at a low level may be pretty difficult to understand and modelize. More precisely this work is motivated by recent studies in population protocols (see [2] for a detailed introduction). They are models of decentralized networks consisting of mobile agents interacting in pairs. These movements are driven by an “adversary”, which picks at each time step two agents according to a process only assumed to be fair (roughly speaking, the fairness condition ensures that any possible configuration is eventually attained ; see again [2] for a formal definition)

Description of our model

Limiting behavior of urns

The set of computable numbers

Conclusion