Randomized Gossip Algorithms
ModellingPosted by David Sumpter Tue, December 01, 2009 19:14:06Our research group had a seminar today by Kristiaan Pelckmans from the control systems department in Uppsala. He talked about models of how individuals communicating on various networks reach consesus. The basic model is that each individual has a starting opinion, which is expressed as a single number, and they then move their own value towards the average of their neighbours. With this model and some extensions, Kristiaan could determine how long it would take for consesus to be reached. This is the second time in a few weeks I have heard that engineers are interested in this problem. I gave a talk at the beginning of November for the Automatic Control Group at KTH in Stockholm, and met Kalle Johansson, Ather Gattami and others there who are working on similar problems.
One interesting claim from this work is that the techniques they use can be used to prove that self-propelled particle models converge to all individuals going in the same direction. It would be interesting to look at this further.
The pdf from Kristiaan's talk is attached below.
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