The term "local" refers to a part of a computer network. When local detection is used, a computer in a network is not required to communicate with the entire network in order to detect an error—the error can be detected by having each computer communicate only with its nearest neighbors. These local detection methods simplified the task of designing self-stabilizing algorithms considerably. This is because the error detection mechanism and the recovery mechanism can be designed separately. Newer algorithms based on these detection methods also turned out to be much more efficient. Moreover, these papers suggested rather efficient general transformers to transform non self stabilizing algorithms to become self stabilizing. The idea is to,