Distributed reasoning in a peer-to-peer setting
P. Adjiman, Philippe Chatalic, François Goasdoué, M.-C. Rousset, Laurent Simon · 2004
Abstract. In a peer-to-peer inference system, each peer can reason locally but can also solicit some of its acquaintances, which are peers sharing part of its vocabulary. In this paper, we consider peerto-peer inference systems in which the local theory of each peer is a set of propositional clauses defined upon a local vocabulary. An important characteristic of peer-to-peer inference systems is that the global theory (the union of all peer theories) is not known (as opposed to partition-based reasoning systems). The contribution of this paper is twofold. We provide the first consequence finding algorithm in a peer-to-peer setting: it is anytime and computes consequences gradually from the solicited peer to peers that are more and more distant. We exhibit a sufficient condition on the acquaintance graph of the peer-to-peer inference system for guaranteeing the completeness of this algorithm. We also present first experimental results that are promising. 1