The evolutionary transition to multicellularity probably began with the formation of simple undifferentiated cellular groups. Such groups evolve readily in diverse lineages of extant unicellular taxa, suggesting that there are few genetic barriers to this first key step. This may act as a double-edged sword: labile transitions between unicellular and multicellular states may facilitate the evol...

Virtual synchrony is an important abstraction that is proven to be extremely useful when implemented over asynchronous, typically large, message-passing distributed systems. Fault tolerant design is a key criterion for the success of such implementations. This is because large distributed systems can be highly available as long as they do not depend on the full operational status of every syste...

This note considers the problem of synchronizing a network of digital clocks: the clocks all run at the same rate, however, an initial state of the network may place the clocks in arbitrary phases. The problem is to devise a protocol to advance or retard clocks so that eventually all clocks are in phase. The solutions presented in this note are protocols in which all processes are identical and...

A self-stabilizing simulation of a single-writer multi-reader atomic register is presented. The simulation works in asynchronous message-passing systems, and allows processes to crash, as long as at least a majority of them remain working. A key element in the simulation is a new combinatorial construction of a bounded labeling scheme that can accommodate arbitrary labels, i.e., including those...

Dynamics in a distributed system are self-stabilizing if they are guaranteed to reach a stable state regardless of how the system is initialized. Game dynamics are uncoupled if each player’s behavior is independent of the other players’ preferences. For uncoupled players, recognizing an equilibrium is a distributed computational task. Self-stabilizing uncoupled dynamics, then, capture both resi...

Four patients with congenital defiother family were found to have varyciency of fibrin-stabilizing factor (facing degrees of factor XIII deficiency. tor XIII) from two families have been The observations support the hypothedescribed. The mother and the sibs in sis of autosomal recessive inheritance one family and both parents in the of factor XIII deficiency. T HE EXISTENCE OF A BLOOD FACTOR th...

A self-stabilizing construction of the minimum-spanning forest of distributed network is described. The algorithm demonstrates that techniques of graph reduction and iteration can be employed in the context of stabilizing distributed programs. The program development follows the principle of layering in the construction of self-stabilizing algorithms, where each layer corresponds to one level o...

Genetic variation in single traits, including those closely related to fitness, is pervasive and generally high. By contrast, theory predicts that several forms of selection, including stabilizing selection, will eliminate genetic variation. Stabilizing selection in natural populations tends to be stronger than that assumed in theoretical models of the maintenance of genetic variation. The wide...

Self-stabilizing local k-placement of replicas with minimal variance. Self-stabilizing algorithm for maximal graph partitioning into triangles.

In this paper, we investigate the possibility to deterministically solve the gathering problem (GP) with weak robots (anonymous, autonomous, disoriented, deaf and dumb, and oblivious). We introduce strong multiplicity detection as the ability for the robots to detect the exact number of robots located at a given position. We show that with strong multiplicity detection, there exists a determini...