Abstract
Most impossibility results in distributed computing follow from a lack of knowledge or uncertainty about the system. At any point in time, the state of a process, including the value of its input variables, is the knowledge the process has about the system. To solve many distributed computing problems, processes need to learn information about the states of other processes. Proofs of unsolvability results show that this knowledge cannot be obtained; proofs of lower bounds show that this knowledge cannot be obtained with limited resources.
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Attiya, H., Ellen, F. (2014). Indistinguishability. In: Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing. Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02010-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02010-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-00882-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-02010-0
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