| Article ID: | iaor2001562 |
| Country: | Japan |
| Volume: | J-83-D-1 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 26 |
| End Page Number: | 35 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2000 |
| Journal: | Transactions of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers |
| Authors: | Yamashita Masafumi |
| Keywords: | graphs, networks |
A distributed system consists of a set of autonomous agents and a set of communication links, each of which supports direct communication between a pair of agents, and is characterized by the absence of an agent who controls the whole system. Like human society, agents are apt to compete for shared resources and hence need conflict resolution algorithms. In many cases, the problem of conflict resolution is reduced to that of breaking a kind of symmetry among agents. This paper surveys researches on symmetries appearing in distributed computing.