Bounded polynomial randomized consensus

Abstract

K. Abrahamson presented a solution to the randomized consensus problem of B. Chor, A. Israeli and M. Li, without assuming the existence of an atomic coin flip operation. This elegant algorithm uses unbounded memory, and has expected exponential running time. J. Aspens and M.P. Herlihy provided a breakthrough polynomial-time algorithm. However, it too is based on the use of unbounded memory. In this paper, we present a solution to the randomized consensus problem that is bounded in space and runs in polynomial expected time.