The FLP Impossibility Result
A handful of computers cannot be guaranteed to agree on a single value if even one of them might be slow. Not merely hard — impossible.
198523 min read
American computer science
Michael J. Fischer
American computer scientist, long a professor at Yale, whose work spans computational complexity, cryptography and distributed computing. With Nancy Lynch and Michael Paterson he proved in 1985 that no deterministic protocol can solve consensus in an asynchronous system if even one process may crash — a result that reshaped how distributed systems are specified and built.