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lovelearning | 3 months ago

A cited paper's title is "There is more consensus in Egalitarian parliaments." Are terms like "democracy" and "parliament" common terms in distributed computing theory? Or are these intentionally clickbaity/humorous paper titles?

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dgacmu|3 months ago

The original Paxos paper was termed "The Part-Time Parliament", and was explained -- I'm serious here -- not as a distributed systems protocol, but as a discussion about how electors on a Greek island could vote despite wandering in and out of the room. (Lamport). It set the stage for a series of papers using that theme. We continued on that theme when picking the title for the EPaxos paper, and these folks built on that. So yeah, it's a bit of a thing specifically in the paxos literature.

And wait until I tell you about the Byzantine Generals Problem. :-)