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Probability of a bad partition

Open isheff opened this issue 2 years ago • 0 comments

Stated generally, given N validators, of which f are faulty:

  1. If we assign each validator (uniformly and independently at random) one of K partitions, what are the odds that:
    1. no partition has more than x faulty validators?
    2. every partition has at least y non-faulty validators?
    3. no partition has a ratio of faulty validators / non-faulty validators greater than z?
    4. no partition is empty?
  2. If we choose K (possibly overlapping) subsets of validators (uniformly at random), each of size S, what are the odds that:
    1. no subset has more than x faulty validators?
    2. every subset has at least y non-faulty validators?
    3. no subset has a ratio of faulty validators / non-faulty validators greater than z?
    4. every validator is in a subset?
    5. Is there anything convenient about the special case where K×S=N?
  3. If we (uniformly at random) partition the validators into K (non-overlapping) partitions, each of size S (so K×S=N), what are the odds that:
    1. no partition has more than x faulty validators?
    2. every partition has at least y non-faulty validators?
    3. no partition has a ratio of faulty validators / non-faulty validators greater than z?
    4. what if instead of all being size S, each partition has size S or S+1, and K×S<N< K×(S+1)?

These seem like classic Balls & Bins problems, but I don't know the answers.

These probabilities could be important in calculating the odds that a randomly-selected "shard" of validators is correct.

isheff avatar May 03 '22 15:05 isheff