The Joke-Publication of the Paxos Algorithm

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-paxos

by nmc • 13 years ago

31 11 13 years ago

research.microsoft.com

lmm• 13 years ago

Reading, and understanding, an algorithm is hard at the best of times. Adding a funny story makes it triply so. I'm currently trying to read a Haskell paper where the authors seem more interested in impressing us with their shakespeare allusions than actually explaining the thing and I'm starting to wish the journal had rejected it.

The dry style of journals evolved that way for a reason.

judk• 13 years ago

Which paper?

mcguire2• 13 years ago

"The dry style of journals evolved that way for a reason."

Because neither the authors of most scientific papers nor the editors of most scientific journals and conference proceedings can write well?

Now, Paxos and the Byzantine Generals thing are probably examples of Lamport going too far in the other, impressed-with-his-own-wittiness direction, but I've had many more problems understanding papers in the dry style, where gibberish seems to be accepted if it's in the right form. (And I'm looking at you, Flaviu Cristian.)

georgewfraser• 13 years ago

Have you ever been to a conference? A platform presentation, or someone standing in front of a poster explaining their research, is approximately 1000 times easier to understand than the paper they write a year later where they have to satisfy reviewers with a "dry" style.

tinco• 13 years ago

That's crazy, I had to implement a distributed system a few years ago, after some research I decided on using the Paxos algorithm. Never during my implementation or research I noticed that the whole Greek backstory thing was a joke.

Now when I reread the wiki article, I realise I must have read over one crucial word in the summary:

"The Paxos protocol was first published in 1989 and named after a fictional legislative consensus system used on the Paxos island in Greece"

mcguire2• 13 years ago

Buridan's Principle[1] is even better.

"My problems in trying to publish this paper and [22] are part of a long tradition. According to one story I've heard (but haven't verified), someone at G. E. discovered the phenomenon in computer circuits in the early 60s, but was unable to convince his managers that there was a problem. He published a short note about it, for which he was fired. Charles Molnar, one of the pioneers in the study of the problem, reported the following in a lecture given on February 11, 1992, at HP Corporate Engineering in Palo Alto, California:

"'One reviewer made a marvelous comment in rejecting one of the early papers, saying that if this problem really existed it would be so important that everybody knowledgeable in the field would have to know about it, and "I'm an expert and I don't know about it, so therefore it must not exist."'"

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

kens• 13 years ago

How does Paxos compare to the Bitcoin protocol? I've seen claims that Bitcoin is the first practical solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem (e.g. from Marc Andreessen recently), but it seems like Paxos is a better solution. (Handles network partition, avoids arbitrary rollback, finite time to reach consensus.)

Does anyone have a semi-rigorous explanation of what Bitcoin actually accomplishes with BGP?

ryanobjc• 13 years ago

At first I was annoyed by this comment, but then I realized, I was taken by a very clever joke!

Hats off to you sir!

alexnewman• 13 years ago

Indeed, I went through all of the stages of grief in about 12 seconds, and then laughed

mindslight• 13 years ago

Bitcoin defends against Sybil attacks by making 'hashing power' the metric for vote weight.

The Joke-Publication of the Paxos Algorithm

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