Majority consensus and the local majority rule

Abstract

We study a rather generic communication/coordination/computation problem: in a finite network of agents, each initially having one of the two possible states, can the majority initial state be computed and agreed upon by means of local computation only? We describe the architecture of networks that are always capable of reaching the consensus on the majority initial state of its agents. In particular, we show that, for any truly local network of agents, there are instances in which the network is not capable of reaching such consensus. Thus, every truly local computation approach that requires reaching consensus is not failurefree. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.