Lower bounds for searching robots, some faulty

Abstract

Suppose we are sending out k robots from 0 to search the real line at constant speed (with turns) to find a target at an unknown location; f of the robots are faulty, meaning that they fail to report the target although visiting its location (called crash type). The goal is to find the target in time at most $\lambda |x|$, if the target is located at x, $|x| \ge 1$, for $\lambda$ as small as possible. We show that this cannot be achieved for

$$\begin{aligned}&\lambda < 2\frac{\rho ^\rho }{(\rho -1)^{\rho -1}}+1,~~ \rho := \frac{2(f+1)}{k}~, \end{aligned}$$

which is tight due to earlier work (see Czyzowitz et al. in Proc PODC’16, pp 405–414, 2016, where this problem was introduced). This also gives some better than previously known lower bounds for so-called Byzantine-type faulty robots that may actually wrongly report a target. In the second part of the paper we deal with the m-rays generalization of the problem, where the hidden target is to be detected on m rays all emanating at the same point. Using a generalization of our methods, along with a useful relaxation of the original problem, we establish a tight lower for this setting as well (as above, with $\rho := \nicefrac {m(f+1)}{k}$). When specialized to the case $f=0$, this resolves the question on parallel search on m rays, posed by three groups of scientists some 15–30 years ago: by Baeza-Yates, Culberson, and Rawlins; by Kao, Ma, Sipser, and Yin; and by Bernstein, Finkelstein, and Zilberstein. The m-rays generalization is known to have connections to other, seemingly unrelated, problems, including hybrid algorithms for on-line problems, and so-called contract algorithms.