We consider the following interaction scenario: a population of agents is required to perpetually detect whether or not the population contains at least one agent in a distinguished state X. This problem may be viewed as a variant of rumor-spreading, in which a “true” rumor should spread and persist in the population for as long as its primary rumor source X is present, and a “false” rumor without a source should be actively suppressed. Investigations into the problem are also directly motivated by the question of detecting and amplifying trace concentrations of a chemical substance X, e.g., in a framework of DNA computing with chemical reaction networks (CRN-s).

We describe two population protocols which solve the considered problem efficiently, converging to a correct output state on a (1-epsilon)-fraction of a population of n agents within a polylogarithmic number of steps, starting from any initial configuration of the system, w.h.p. under a fair uniformly random scheduler. One of the proposed protocols requires O(log n) states and has certain desirable robustness properties, while the other uses only a constant number of states.