Pith Number

pith:QN5EGWEI

pith:2025:QN5EGWEI2HZJCCFCUEHIQM2CT6

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The price of uncertainty for social consensus

Alec Sun, Yunzhe Bai

Even small relative uncertainty in neighbor color counts greatly hinders consensus in social networks.

arxiv:2508.17557 v5 · 2025-08-24 · cs.GT · cs.MA · cs.SI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{QN5EGWEI2HZJCCFCUEHIQM2CT6}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

even small values of ε greatly hinder the ability to achieve consensus in a social network. We prove theoretically tight upper and lower bounds on the price of uncertainty

C2weakest assumption

The model of uncertainty as relative multiplicative perturbations of magnitude 1+ε to the exact neighbor color counts, combined with the assumption that agents always follow a strict local majority rule (abstract, paragraph 2).

C3one line summary

Proves tight upper and lower bounds showing that even small multiplicative perturbations (1+ε) to neighbor color counts greatly increase the price of uncertainty for reaching consensus in social graphs.

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-07-03T00:16:50.366223Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

837a435888d1f29108a2a10e8833429f97ccbf4a353c694dcc727510a6e478fa

Aliases

arxiv: 2508.17557 · arxiv_version: 2508.17557v5 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2508.17557 · pith_short_12: QN5EGWEI2HZJ · pith_short_16: QN5EGWEI2HZJCCFC · pith_short_8: QN5EGWEI

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/QN5EGWEI2HZJCCFCUEHIQM2CT6 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 837a435888d1f29108a2a10e8833429f97ccbf4a353c694dcc727510a6e478fa

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "dc7544433995334c8aea452094071ba93995b5eff710b0c596dbe53eec2b8d4d",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.MA",
      "cs.SI"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.GT",
    "submitted_at": "2025-08-24T23:48:37Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "c746c0865127195c908f3a177b6a9d1601db3b8581dc6db6234a6513c95dc9b2"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2508.17557",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 5
  }
}