The universe of symmetry breaking tasks

This brief announcement introduces the family of generalized symmetry breaking (GSB) tasks, that includes election, renaming and many other symmetry breaking tasks. Differently from agreement tasks, a GSB task is "inputless", in the sense that processes do not propose values; the task specifies only the symmetry breaking requirement, independently of the system's initial state (where processes differ only on their identifiers). Among various results characterizing the family of GSB tasks, it is shown that (non adaptive) perfect renaming is universal for all GSB tasks.

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