Majority Dynamics and the Retention of Information

作者:Tamuz Omer*; Tessler Ran J
来源:Israel Journal of Mathematics, 2015, 206(1): 483-507.
DOI:10.1007/s11856-014-1148-2

摘要

We consider a group of agents connected by a social network who participate in majority dynamics: each agent starts with an opinion in {-1, +1} and repeatedly updates it to match the opinion of the majority of its neighbors. We assume that one of {-1, +1} is the "correct" opinion S, and consider a setting in which the initial opinions are independent conditioned on S, and biased towards it. They hence contain enough information to reconstruct S with high probability. We ask whether it is still possible to reconstruct S from the agents' opinions after many rounds of updates. While this is not the case in general, we show that indeed, for a large family of bounded degree graphs, information on S is retained by the process of majority dynamics. Our proof technique yields novel combinatorial results on majority dynamics on both finite and infinite graphs, with applications to zero temperature Ising models.

  • 出版日期2015-2