Weak symmetry breaking and abstract simplex paths

Abstract

Motivated by questions in theoretical distributed computing, we develop the combinatorial theory of abstract simplex path subdivisions. Our main application is a short and structural proof of the theorem of Castaneda and Rajsbaum. This theorem in turn implies the solvability of the weak symmetry breaking task in the immediate snapshot wait-free model in the case when the number of processes is not a power of a prime number.