Buridan's Ass
A donkey stands exactly halfway between two identical bales of hay. With no reason on earth to prefer either, does it starve?
c. 1340 (the attribution; the example is far older)14 min read
American computer science
Leslie Lamport
1941
American computer scientist whose work defined how the field reasons about distributed systems: logical clocks and the happened-before relation (1978), the Byzantine Generals Problem (1982) with Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease, sequential consistency, and the Paxos consensus algorithm (1998). He also wrote LaTeX. He received the 2013 ACM Turing Award for imposing "clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behaviour of distributed computing systems".
2 entries
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Several generals must attack together or be destroyed. They can only send messengers, and some of the generals are traitors.
198222 min read