Leslie Lamport

With three people, one traitor makes a solution mathematically impossible.

In 1982, three computer scientists at SRI International in California, Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease, published a paper proving exactly this.

Their paper gave us the Byzantine generals problem and a family of solutions for tolerating it, what we now broadly call Byzantine fault tolerance, or BFT.

And their solution, when you hear it, is almost insultingly simple.

You must always know exactly who sent them, and you must be able to tell if a message was never sent.

Without those three, a traitor could simply impersonate a loyal lieutenant, and the whole system collapses.

But if those assumptions hold, Lamport's protocol, called the oral message algorithm, takes exactly two rounds.

Round one, the commander sends his order to all three lieutenants.

Well, I would like to shift a little bit now to ask you for your personal perspective on some big picture questions about AI today that seem to be on everybody's minds.

CHM fellow Leslie Lamport, who made huge contributions to distributed computing, wanted me to ask, is this technology going to destroy civilization? AI doom is in media headlines everywhere, every day.

Some in the AI industry say it's a real worry.

Others say it isn't.

Envartolome.com.

The article lists key papers that shaped the field of distributed systems, including foundational works by Leslie Lamport, The Byzantine General's Problem, Paxos, and Bitcoin's White Paper.

It aims to provide a starting point for understanding how distributed systems evolved and highlight influential research papers across decades.

In the comments, the community mostly discussed the importance of Lamport's work and his influence on distributed systems.

Users debated the readability of Lamport's papers, with some finding his writings less accessible, while others appreciated their clarity.

There was considerable discussion about the relevance of classical papers like Paxos and Byzantine fault tolerance, and whether newer approaches have replaced them.

Several comments highlighted that the core principles, including consensus and logical clocks, remain vital, and some shared personal experiences studying distributed systems.