Brief Announcement: Efficient Distributed Algorithms for Shape Reduction via Reconfigurable Circuits

In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently reducing geometric shapes into other such shapes in a distributed setting through size-changing operations. We develop distributed algorithms using the reconfigurable circuit model to enable fast node-to-node communication. Let n denote the number of nodes and k the number of turning points in the initial shape. We show that the system of nodes can reduce itself from any tree to a single node using only shrinking operations in O(k log n) rounds w.h.p. and any tree to its incompressible form in O(log n) rounds given prior knowledge of the incompressible nodes, or O(k log n) without it, w.h.p. We also give an algorithm to transform any tree to a topologically equivalent tree in O(k log n + log2 n) rounds w.h.p. using both shrinking and growth operations. On the negative side, we show that one cannot hope for o(log2 n)-round transformations for all shapes of Θ(log n) turning points.