Musical Chairs

DOI10.1137/12088478XMaRDI QIDQ2935289zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Yehuda Afek, Yakov Babichenko, Eli Gafni, Nathan Linial, Benny Sudakov, Uriel Feige

Publication date 22 December 2014

Published in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0813

zbMATH Keywords

distributed computingasynchronous computationprobabilistic analysisrenamingoblivious computing

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Noncooperative games (91A10) Distributed algorithms (68W15)

Abstract: In the {em Musical Chairs} game $MC(n,m)$ a team of $n$ players plays against an adversarial {em scheduler}. The scheduler wins if the game proceeds indefinitely, while termination after a finite number of rounds is declared a win of the team. At each round of the game each player {em occupies} one of the $m$ available {em chairs}. Termination (and a win of the team) is declared as soon as each player occupies a unique chair. Two players that simultaneously occupy the same chair are said to be {em in conflict}. In other words, termination (and a win for the team) is reached as soon as there are no conflicts. The only means of communication throughout the game is this: At every round of the game, the scheduler selects an arbitrary nonempty set of players who are currently in conflict, and notifies each of them separately that it must move. A player who is thus notified changes its chair according to its deterministic program. As we show, for $mge2n-1$ chairs the team has a winning strategy. Moreover, using topological arguments we show that this bound is tight. For $mleq2n-2$ the scheduler has a strategy that is guaranteed to make the game continue indefinitely and thus win. We also have some results on additional interesting questions. For example, if $mge2n-1$ (so that the team can win), how quickly can they achieve victory?

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(4)

• Distributed Computing
• Asynchronous coordination under preferences and constraints
• The assignment problem
• (The Bride's Chair)²

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