License: 
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2018.54
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-95176
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2018/9517/
Boczkowski, Lucas ;
Korman, Amos ;
Rodeh, Yoav
Searching a Tree with Permanently Noisy Advice
Abstract
We consider a search problem on trees using unreliable guiding instructions. Specifically, an agent starts a search at the root of a tree aiming to find a treasure hidden at one of the nodes by an adversary. Each visited node holds information, called advice, regarding the most promising neighbor to continue the search. However, the memory holding this information may be unreliable. Modeling this scenario, we focus on a probabilistic setting. That is, the advice at a node is a pointer to one of its neighbors. With probability q each node is faulty, independently of other nodes, in which case its advice points at an arbitrary neighbor, chosen uniformly at random. Otherwise, the node is sound and points at the correct neighbor. Crucially, the advice is permanent, in the sense that querying a node several times would yield the same answer. We evaluate efficiency by two measures: The move complexity denotes the expected number of edge traversals, and the query complexity denotes the expected number of queries.
Let Delta denote the maximal degree. Roughly speaking, the main message of this paper is that a phase transition occurs when the noise parameter q is roughly 1/sqrt{Delta}. More precisely, we prove that above the threshold, every search algorithm has query complexity (and move complexity) which is both exponential in the depth d of the treasure and polynomial in the number of nodes n. Conversely, below the threshold, there exists an algorithm with move complexity O(d sqrt{Delta}), and an algorithm with query complexity O(sqrt{Delta}log Delta log^2 n). Moreover, for the case of regular trees, we obtain an algorithm with query complexity O(sqrt{Delta}log n log log n). For q that is below but close to the threshold, the bound for the move complexity is tight, and the bounds for the query complexity are not far from the lower bound of Omega(sqrt{Delta}log_Delta n).
In addition, we also consider a semi-adversarial variant, in which an adversary chooses the direction of advice at faulty nodes. For this variant, the threshold for efficient moving algorithms happens when the noise parameter is roughly 1/Delta. Above this threshold a simple protocol that follows each advice with a fixed probability already achieves optimal move complexity.
BibTeX - Entry
@InProceedings{boczkowski_et_al:LIPIcs:2018:9517,
author = {Lucas Boczkowski and Amos Korman and Yoav Rodeh},
title = {{Searching a Tree with Permanently Noisy Advice}},
booktitle = {26th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2018)},
pages = {54:1--54:13},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-081-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {112},
editor = {Yossi Azar and Hannah Bast and Grzegorz Herman},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/9517},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-95176},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2018.54},
annote = {Keywords: Data structures, Graph search, Average Case Analysis}
}
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Keywords: |
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Data structures, Graph search, Average Case Analysis |
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Collection: |
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26th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2018) |
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Issue Date: |
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2018 |
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Date of publication: |
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14.08.2018 |
