Ants: Mobile Finite State Machines

Consider the Ants Nearby Treasure Search (ANTS) problem introduced by Feinerman, Korman, Lotker, and Sereni (PODC 2012), where n mobile agents, initially placed at the origin of an infinite grid, collaboratively search for an adversarially hidden treasure. In this paper, the model of Feinerman et al. is adapted such that the agents are controlled by a (randomized) finite state machine: they possess a constant-size memory and are able to communicate with each other through constant-size messages. Despite the restriction to constant-size memory, we show that their collaborative performance remains the same by presenting a distributed algorithm that matches a lower bound established by Feinerman et al. on the run-time of any ANTS algorithm. Contact Author Information Tobias Langner ETH Zurich Gloriastrasse 35, ETZ G61.4 8092 Zurich Switzerland phone: +41 44 63 27730 email: [email protected] ∗ETH Zurich, Switzerland †ETH Zurich, Switzerland ‡ETH Zurich, Switzerland §Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA and ETH Zurich, Switzerland 1 ar X iv :1 31 1. 30 62 v1 [ cs .D C ] 1 3 N ov 2 01 3