Oblivious and Adaptive Strategies for the Majority and Plurality Problems
In the well-studied Majority problem, we are given a set of n balls colored with two or more colors, and the goal is to use the minimum number of color comparisons to find a ball of the majority color (i.e., a color that occurs for more than 「n/2」 times). The Plurality problem has exactly the same setting while the goal is to find a ball of the dominant color (i.e., a color that occurs most often). Previous literature regarding this topic dealt mainly with adaptive strategies, whereas in this paper we focus more on the oblivious (i.e., nonadaptive) strategies. Given that our strategies are oblivious, we establish a linear upper bound for the Majority problem with arbitrarily many different colors. We then show that the Plurality problem is significantly more difficult by establishing quadratic lower and upper bounds. In the end, we also discuss some generalized upper bounds for adaptive strategies in the k-color Plurality problem.
Fan Chung Ron Graham Jia Mao Andrew Yao
Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, China
国际会议
The 11th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference COCOON 2005(第11届国际计算和组合会议)
昆明
英文
329-338
2005-08-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）