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The Power of Two Random Choices: A Survey of Techniques and Results (2000)
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| Venue: | in Handbook of Randomized Computing |
| Citations: | 131 - 6 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Mitzenmacher00thepower,
author = {Michael Mitzenmacher and Andréa W. Richa and Ramesh Sitaraman},
title = {The Power of Two Random Choices: A Survey of Techniques and Results},
booktitle = {in Handbook of Randomized Computing},
year = {2000},
pages = {255--312},
publisher = {Kluwer}
}
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Abstract
ITo motivate this survey, we begin with a simple problem that demonstrates a powerful fundamental idea. Suppose that n balls are thrown into n bins, with each ball choosing a bin independently and uniformly at random. Then the maximum load, or the largest number of balls in any bin, is approximately log n= log log n with high probability. Now suppose instead that the balls are placed sequentially, and each ball is placed in the least loaded of d 2 bins chosen independently and uniformly at random. Azar, Broder, Karlin, and Upfal showed that in this case, the maximum load is log log n= log d + (1) with high probability [ABKU99]. The important implication of this result is that even a small amount of choice can lead to drastically different results in load balancing. Indeed, having just two random choices (i.e.,...
