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Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Gossip Protocols for Super Experts

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Abstract

A gossip protocol is a procedure for sharing secrets in a network. The basic action in a gossip protocol is a pairwise message exchange (telephone call) wherein the calling agents exchange all the secrets they know. An agent who knows all secrets is an expert. The usual termination condition is that all agents are experts. Instead, we explore protocols wherein the termination condition is that all agents know that all agents are experts. We call such agents super experts. We also investigate gossip protocols that are common knowledge among the agents. Additionally, we model that agents who are super experts do not make and do not answer calls, and that this is common knowledge. We investigate conditions under which protocols terminate, both in the synchronous case, where there is a global clock, and in the asynchronous case, where there is not. We show that a commonly known protocol with engaged agents may terminate faster than the same commonly known protocol without engaged agents.

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Acknowledgements

This work is loosely based on a contribution [27] with a similar title and one additional author (Rasoul Ramezanian), for a volume honouring Mohammad Ardeshir at his retirement. We thank the reviewers of previous versions of this article, and in particular the reviewer at Studia Logica for their helpful corrections and detailed comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Hans van Ditmarsch

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Malvin Gattinger

  3. Shomara LLC, Tehran, Iran

    Rahim Ramezanian

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  1. Hans van Ditmarsch
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Correspondence to Hans van Ditmarsch.

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van Ditmarsch, H., Gattinger, M. & Ramezanian, R. Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Gossip Protocols for Super Experts. Stud Logica 111, 453–499 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-022-10032-3

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