Introduction to Distributed Randomized Algorithms

Abstract

In the previous sections we dealt with deterministic algorithms. In the current section we turn to describing randomized ones. The best currently known randomized algorithms for distributed symmetry breaking problems are much more efficient than the best–known deterministic ones (unless the maximum degree of the input graph is very small). However, randomized algorithms have the drawback that with some (very small) probability over the coin tosses of the algorithms they may fail or not terminate within the expected time.