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Qualifying Exam
9/22/2014 04:00 pm
CoRE B(Room 305)

Dynamics at the Boundary of Game Theory and Distributed Computing

Neil Lutz, Rutgers University

Examination Committee: Rebecca Wright (Chair), Badri Nath, Michael Saks, and Shubhangi Saraf

Abstract

This talk will address recent results about game dynamics in distributed environments, with a focus on self-stabilizing uncoupled dynamics. In a distributed system, dynamics are self-stabilizing if they are guaranteed to reach a stable state regardless of how the system is initialized. Game dynamics are uncoupled if each player’s behavior is independent of the other players’ preferences. Recognizing an equilibrium in this setting is a distributed computational task. Self-stabilizing uncoupled dynamics, then, have both resilience to arbitrary initial states and distribution of knowledge.