Oberseminar
David Kohan Marzagão, University of Hamburg
March 05, 2021, 11:00, zoom: https://uni-hamburg.zoom.us/j/94889228942
Title: The Influence of Memory in Multi-Agent Consensus
Multi-agent consensus problems can often be seen as a sequence of autonomous and
independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local
choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared goal of achieving a global consensus
state. Being able to estimate probabilities for the different outcomes and to predict how
long it takes for a consensus to be formed, if ever, are core issues for such protocols.
Little attention has been given to protocols in which agents can remember past or
outdated states. In this paper, we propose a framework to study what we call `memory
consensus protocol'. We show that the employment of memory allows such processes to
always converge, as well as, in some scenarios, such as cycles, converge faster. We
provide a theoretical analysis of the probability of each option eventually winning such
processes based on the initial opinions expressed by agents. Further, we perform
experiments to investigate network topologies in which agents benefit from memory on the
expected time needed for consensus.