Biased Gossip
Above, a purely random peer-selection scheme for gossip was described: when agent A decides to run a gossip round, it picks some peer B uniformly and at random within the network as a whole (or launches a message on a random walk that will terminate at a random agent). More commonly, gossip algorithms are designed so that agents interact mostly with nearby agents, and only sometimes with agents that are far away (in terms of network delay). These biased gossip protocols need to ensure a sufficient degree of connectivity to avoid the risk of complete disconnection of one side of a network from the other, but if care is taken, can be faster and more efficient than protocols that are purely random. Moreover, as a purely practical question, it is much easier to maintain lists of peers in ways that might be somewhat biased.
Read more about this topic: Gossip Protocol
Famous quotes containing the words biased and/or gossip:
“Scientists are human—they’re as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)