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Analysis of heuristics for the freeze-tag problem

  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the Freeze Tag Problem (FTP) we are given a swarm of n asleep (frozen or inactive) robots and a single awake (active) robot, and we want to awaken all robots in the shortest possible time. A robot is awakened when an active robot “touches” it. The goal is to compute an optimal awakening schedule such that all robots are awake by time t*, for the smallest possible value of t*. We devise and test heuristic strategies on geometric and network datasets. Our experiments show that all of the strategies perform well, with the simple greedy strategy performing particularly well. A theoretical analysis of the greedy strategy gives a tight approximation bound of Θ(√log n) for points in the plane. We show more generally that the (tight) performance bound is Θ((log n)1−1/d) in d dimensions. This is in contrast to general metric spaces, where greedy is known to have a Θ(log n) approximation factor, and no method is known to achieve an approximation bound of o(log n).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithm Theory - SWAT 2002 - 8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, Proceedings
EditorsMartti Penttonen, Erik Meineche Schmidt
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages270-279
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9783540438663
DOIs
StatePublished - 2002
Event8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2002 - Turku, Finland
Duration: Jul 3 2002Jul 5 2002

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume2368
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2002
Country/TerritoryFinland
CityTurku
Period07/3/0207/5/02

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