The Locality of Distributed Symmetry Breaking

We present new methods for solving several classical symmetry breaking
tasks in distributed networks, such as finding maximal independent
sets, maximal matchings, and vertex-colorings.

This is joint work with Leonid Barenboim, Michael Elkin, and Johannes Schneider. An extended abstract appeared in FOCS 2012. PDF available at http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~pettie/papers/Symmetry-Breaking.pdf.