On the Complexity of Distributed Splitting Problems

One of the fundamental open problems in the area of distributed graph algorithms is whether randomization is needed for efficient symmetry breaking. While there are poly log n-time randomized algorithms for all the classic symmetry breaking problems, for many of them, the best deterministic algorithms are almost exponentially slower. The following basic local splitting problem, which is known as weak splitting, takes a central role in this context: Each node of a graph G=(V,E) has to be colored red or blue such that each node of sufficiently large degree has at least one neighbor of each color. Ghaffari, Kuhn, and Maus [STOC '17] showed that this seemingly simple problem is complete w.r.t. the above fundamental open question in the following sense: If there is an efficient poly log n-time determinstic distributed algorithm for weak splitting, then there is such an algorithm for all locally checkable graph problems for which an efficient randomized algorithm exists. We investigate the distributed complexity of weak splitting and some closely related problems and we in particular obtain the following results: