IOTA Foundation published a report about one of the latest Coordicide Grant programs. Cellular Automata is the main topic of the new report named Majority Vote Dynamics for IOTA Transaction Consensus. Dr. André Vilela and Dr. Kenric Nelson are the lead scientists of this study that have examined Cellular Automata as an extension to IOTA’s consensus mechanism.
IOTA plans to change the network’s overall mechanism to a consensus-based one, and the new extensions can pave the way toward that.
The study about Cellular Automata started in May 2020 when the grant was awarded to the scientists. Now they have published the full report about the multiple aspects of CA consensus algorithms.
“The research included simulations of Cellular Automata using a majority model on a k-regular graph in order to determine the agreement and success rates for consensus given various vote scenarios among connected neighbors. The goal was to draft potentially viable approaches to the CA voting processes for achieving consensus,” according to IOTA.
The study’s main result shows that the standard voter model in the new algorithms has a low success rate on random graphs. But Dr. Vilela and Dr. Nelson found many other mechanisms that can improve the convergence rate.
“As explained in the report, Dr. Vilela and Dr. Nelson provide lower bounds on k, the number of neighbors, required for good convergence. They also discovered that convergence rates improve if ties are decided by a coin toss, rather than remaining the same color as before,” added IOTA. After all, the recent results show that there should be more studies regarding CA’s role for consensus in the IOTA network.
The new report is the beginning of more exploration of Cellular Automata and the impacts on IOTA. IOTA Foundation believes CA can be applied on sharded Tangle. But surely it needs more study and investigation.
“We are investigating whether consensus in a sharded Tangle can rely on a combination of consensus mechanisms, including FPC and CA, as well as the utilization of a reputation system. We look forward to offering more discussion on this topic in the near future”. You can download the full report here.
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