New Classes of Distributed Time Complexity

A number of recent papers -- e.g. Brandt et al. (STOC 2016), Chang et al. (FOCS 2016), Ghaffari & Su (SODA 2017), Brandt et al. (PODC 2017), and Chang & Pettie (FOCS 2017) -- have advanced our understanding of one of the most fundamental questions in theory of distributed computing: what are the possible time complexity classes of LCL problems in the LOCAL model? In essence, we have a graph problem $Π$ in which a solution can be verified by checking all radius-$O(1)$ neighbourhoods, and the question is what is the smallest $T$ such that a solution can be computed so that each node chooses its own output based on its radius-$T$ neighbourhood. Here $T$ is the distributed time complexity of $Π$. The time complexity classes for deterministic algorithms in bounded-degree graphs that are known to exist by prior work are $Θ(1)$, $Θ(\log^* n)$, $Θ(\log n)$, $Θ(n^{1/k})$, and $Θ(n)$. It is also known that there are two gaps: one between $ω(1)$ and $o(\log \log^* n)$, and another between $ω(\log^* n)$ and $o(\log n)$. It has been conjectured that many more gaps exist, and that the overall time hierarchy is relatively simple -- indeed, this is known to be the case in restricted graph families such as cycles and grids. We show that the picture is much more diverse than previously expected. We present a general technique for engineering LCL problems with numerous different deterministic time complexities, including $Θ(\log^αn)$ for any $α\ge1$, $2^{Θ(\log^αn)}$ for any $α\le 1$, and $Θ(n^α)$ for any $α<1/2$ in the high end of the complexity spectrum, and $Θ(\log^α\log^* n)$ for any $α\ge 1$, $\smash{2^{Θ(\log^α\log^* n)}}$ for any $α\le 1$, and $Θ((\log^* n)^α)$ for any $α\le 1$ in the low end; here $α$ is a positive rational number.