Abstract
The discovery, more than a decade ago, of the relation between Distributed-Computing (DC) and Algebraic-Topology (AT) raised the specter of requiring checking task solvability to be intimately connected to expertise in AT. Yet, in the area of Centralized Algorithms proving a problem to be NP or PSPACE complete requires more algorithmic expertise than complexity one. In analogy, we show that in DC the equivalent of polynomial-time reductions, is read-write reductions. We define the notion of read-write reduction between distributed tasks, and show that all interesting known read-write impossible tasks can be proven impossible via read-write reduction to a task called Symmetry-Breaking (SB). Discovering a read-write reduction requires solely algorithmic expertise.
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Gafni, E. (2006). Read-Write Reductions. In: Chaudhuri, S., Das, S.R., Paul, H.S., Tirthapura, S. (eds) Distributed Computing and Networking. ICDCN 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4308. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11947950_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11947950_38
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68139-7
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