Team Formation and Applications

2025-08-18

AI Summary

This paper investigates the distributed team formation problem in asynchronous complete graphs with tolerance to initial failures: dynamically injected tokens must be efficiently organized into teams of exact size σ. We present the first randomized, generic framework using bounded-size messages that breaks the linear message lower bound for asynchronous implicit leader election. Our framework achieves O(n) message complexity and O(log n) expected time in the asynchronous model—matching the tight message-complexity lower bound. Beyond solving team formation, our approach unifies and optimizes several classical and emerging distributed problems—including implicit leader election, threshold detection, and online matching—thereby significantly extending the applicability of implicit synchronization primitives.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Humans and AI: Teamwork, Team formation

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

A novel long-lived distributed problem, called Team Formation (TF), is introduced together with a message- and time-efficient randomized algorithm. The problem is defined over the asynchronous model with a complete communication graph, using bounded size messages, where a certain fraction of the nodes may experience a generalized, strictly stronger, version of initial failures. The goal of a TF algorithm is to assemble tokens injected by the environment, in a distributed manner, into teams of size $σ$, where $σ$ is a parameter of the problem. The usefulness of TF is demonstrated by using it to derive efficient algorithms for many distributed problems. Specifically, we show that various (one-shot as well as long-lived) distributed problems reduce to TF. This includes well-known (and extensively studied) distributed problems such as several versions of leader election and threshold detection. For example, we are the first to break the linear message complexity bound for asynchronous implicit leader election. We also improve the time complexity of message-optimal algorithms for asynchronous explicit leader election. Other distributed problems that reduce to TF are new ones, including matching players in online gaming platforms, a generalization of gathering, constructing a perfect matching in an induced subgraph of the complete graph, quorum sensing in message-passing networks, and more. To complement our positive contribution, we establish a tight lower bound on the message complexity of TF algorithms.

Problem

• Introduces Team Formation problem for distributed token assembly
• Reduces various distributed problems to efficient TF solutions
• Breaks linear message bound for asynchronous leader election

Innovation

• Randomized algorithm for Team Formation problem
• Asynchronous model with bounded message size
• Reduces various distributed problems to TF