consensus mechanism

Consensus mechanisms enable multiple agents to reach agreement on outputs through voting or discussion. **Why needed**: Different agents may produce different answers, need systematic way to reconcile, reduce hallucination through agreement, increase reliability. **Voting mechanisms**: Simple majority, weighted by confidence, quorum requirements, ranked choice. **Discussion-based**: Agents debate until convergence, share reasoning, update positions, mediator facilitates. **Implementation**: Parallel agent generation, answer extraction, voting algorithm, tie-breaking rules. **Threshold options**: Unanimous agreement required, supermajority (2/3), plurality wins, no consensus triggers fallback. **Confidence integration**: Agents provide confidence scores, weight votes accordingly, reject low-confidence contributions. **Debate vs voting**: Voting faster but less nuanced, debate explores reasoning but slower, hybrid approaches combine both. **Failure handling**: No consensus → escalate to human, request more agents, defer decision. **Use cases**: Fact-checking, quality control, high-stakes decisions, content moderation. **Trade-offs**: Higher cost (multiple agents), latency (waiting for consensus), complexity. Critical for mission-critical agent applications requiring reliability.