How To Elect a Leader Faster than a Tournament
Dan Alistarh, Rati Gelashvili, Adrian Vladu · 2015
The problem of electing a leader from among n contenders is one of the fundamental questions in distributed computing. In its simplest formulation, the task is as follows: given n processors, all participants must eventually return a win or lose indication, such that a single contender may win. Despite a considerable amount of work on leader election, the following question is still open: can we elect a leader in an asynchronous fault-prone system faster than just running a Θ(log n)-time tournament, against a strong adaptive adversary?