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
British computer science
Michael S. Paterson
British computer scientist and long-serving professor at the University of Warwick, where he founded the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications. He worked on algorithms, complexity and combinatorics, and with Michael Fischer and Nancy Lynch proved the 1985 impossibility of asynchronous deterministic consensus.