Population protocols are a model for distributed computing that is focused on simplicity and robustness. A system of n identical agents (finite state machines) performs a global task like electing a unique leader or determining the majority opinion when each agent has one of two opinions. Agents communicate in pairwise interactions with randomly assigned communication partners. Quality is measured in two ways: the number of interactions to complete the task and the number of states per agent. We present protocols for the majority problem that allow for a trade-off between these two measures. Compared to the only other trade-off result (Alistarh et al. in Proceedings of the 2015 ACM symposium on principles of distributed computing, Donostia-San Sebastián, 2015), we improve the number of interactions by almost a linear factor. Furthermore, our protocols can be made uniform (working correctly without any information on the population size n), yielding the first uniform majority protocols that stabilize in a subquadratic number of interactions.

中文翻译：

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多数问题的种群协议中的时空权衡

人口协议是分布式计算的一种模型，专注于简单性和健壮性。由 n 个相同代理（有限状态机）组成的系统执行全局任务，例如在每个代理具有两种意见之一时选举唯一的领导者或确定多数意见。代理与随机分配的通信伙伴成对交互进行通信。质量以两种方式衡量：完成任务的交互次数和每个代理的状态数。我们提出了大多数问题的协议，允许在这两种措施之间进行权衡。与唯一的其他权衡结果（Alistarh 等人在 Proceedings of the 2015 ACM symposium on分布式计算，Donostia-San Sebastián，2015 年）相比，我们将交互次数提高了几乎一个线性因子。此外，