When Agents are Powerful: Black Hole Search with Verification in Time-Varying Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kaur, Tanvir, Saxena, Ashish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kaur, Tanvir
Saxena, Ashish
author_facet Kaur, Tanvir
Saxena, Ashish
contents A black hole is a harmful node in a graph that destroys any agent entering it, making its identification a critical task. In the \emph{Black Hole Search with Verification (BHSV)} problem, a team of agents operates on a graph $G$ with the objective that at least one agent survives and correctly identifies an edge incident to the black hole; if no black hole exists, then all agents must terminate. Prior work has studied BHS in arbitrary dynamic graphs under the restrictive \emph{face-to-face} communication model, where agents can exchange information only when co-located. This constraint significantly increases the number of agents required to solve the problem. In this work, we strengthen the capabilities of agents by equipping them with (i) \emph{1-hop visibility}, (ii) \emph{global communication}, and (iii) both \emph{1-hop visibility} and \emph{global communication}. We show that these enhancements lead to more efficient solutions for the BHSV problem in dynamic graphs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Agents are Powerful: Black Hole Search with Verification in Time-Varying Graphs
Kaur, Tanvir
Saxena, Ashish
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
A black hole is a harmful node in a graph that destroys any agent entering it, making its identification a critical task. In the \emph{Black Hole Search with Verification (BHSV)} problem, a team of agents operates on a graph $G$ with the objective that at least one agent survives and correctly identifies an edge incident to the black hole; if no black hole exists, then all agents must terminate. Prior work has studied BHS in arbitrary dynamic graphs under the restrictive \emph{face-to-face} communication model, where agents can exchange information only when co-located. This constraint significantly increases the number of agents required to solve the problem. In this work, we strengthen the capabilities of agents by equipping them with (i) \emph{1-hop visibility}, (ii) \emph{global communication}, and (iii) both \emph{1-hop visibility} and \emph{global communication}. We show that these enhancements lead to more efficient solutions for the BHSV problem in dynamic graphs.
title When Agents are Powerful: Black Hole Search with Verification in Time-Varying Graphs
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22309