Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Puzzle - Asymmetric Latency

Suppose two robots are placed in separate isolated rooms, called A and B. They can communicate, but the communication delay is not symmetric: it takes one second for a message to travel from room B to room A, but three seconds for a message to travel from room A to room B. The robots do not know which room they are in, and they do not have synchronized clocks. The only information they share is some preconceived plan/program for sending messages and responses.


Questions:
1) Can the robots figure out which rooms they are in?
2T) If so, could they figure out the exact values of the one way latencies?
2F) If not, could they at least distinguish cases where the latency is asymmetric from cases where the latency is equal both ways?

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