I was very pleasantly surprised today to discover that what I call (the class of) Population Algorithms has recently (this past year) been considered (not under this name) by Khandekar and Awerbuch. I am delighted to put links to their relevant papers:

• Stateless Distributed Gradient Descent for Positive Linear Programs, Awerbuch, Khandekar, STOC’08
• Stateless Near Optimal Flow Control with Poly-logarithmic Convergence, Awerbuch, Khandekar, LATIN’08