Paper by Quan Nguyen, Article by Michael Kong.

Fantom would like to announce a new short technical paper from one of our key researchers and developers, Quan Nguyen: Fast Stochastic Peer Selection In Proof of Stake Protocols.

Based on the paper from “A. Lipowski and D. Lipowska. Roulette-wheel selection via stochastic acceptance. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 391(6):2193 – 2196, 2012”, the algorithm operates in a similar manner to how numbers are randomly selected in a Roulette wheel, in a sense that each peer has a weight (based on its Proof of Stake score) which impacts the probability of itself being chosen.

Given that the algorithm selects peers in constant time (O(1)), which is independent of the number of nodes N in the network, this is significantly faster than both linear (O(N)) and binary (O(log(N)) searching.

Fantom will now be adapting this to Lachesis, which should result in faster consensus.