Keeping track of the latest gossip in a distributed system

Summary.

 We tackle a natural problem from distributed computing, involving time-stamps. Let ?={p ₁, p ₂, …, p _N } be a set of computing agents or processes which synchronize with each other from time to time and exchange information about themselves and others. The gossip problem is the following: Whenever a set P⊆? meets, the processes in P must decide amongst themselves which of them has the latest information, direct or indirect, about each agent p in the system. We propose an algorithm to solve this problem which is finite-state and local. Formally, this means that our algorithm can be implemented as an asynchronous automaton.