What is a collaborative algorithm?

Question

What is a collaborative algorithm? Is there a scientifically citable reference?

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Details:

• I found many articles about collaborative algorithms, but none (or other websites) with a definition.
• I am actually looking for a term to describe distributed algorithms where each instance has all information at the beginning and can complete the whole task on its own, but the instances help each other whenever they have solved a sub-problem, so the other instances do not have to redo the work (hence "collaboration"). I picked up this terminology in A Collaborative Approach for Multi-Threaded SAT Solving. Do you think the term "collaborative algorithm" is suitable for this? If not, do you know of a better term?

Answer 1

I think the term "collaborative algorithm" is not formal. Actually the term "algorithm" itself is not really formal, as far as I remember. I guess algorithm can be formalized as "a program which runs on a Turing machine". I think I've seen this definition somewhere.

So yes, I guess all in all the term you coined makes sense, but you need to define it somehow yourself (either formally or informally).

Not sure what your background is but ... OK, in scientific papers different authors sometimes use same terms/concepts for denoting different things and sometimes they use different terms for denoting the same thing.

Also, even though computer science papers are scientific not all terms in them are formally defined. So I wouldn't draw too many conclusions based on these papers unless I am familiar to a decent extent with all of them or unless some of them are considered really remarkable and widely accepted as a de-facto standard in a particular sub-field or field.

Answer 2

No, there's no scientifically citable references.

All parallel/distributed programming is "collaborative" in a sense that several threads/nodes are collaborating on the same big task.

distributed algorithms where.. instances help each other whenever they have solved a sub-problem - even some web application clusters fit your description: individual cluster nodes "solve subproblems" and store the "solutions" in a distributed in-RAM storage (such as memcached or cassandra or many others) thus helping each other.