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Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
Summary: Shows that in a fully asynchronous system, no deterministic protocol can guarantee termination for binary consensus if even one process may fail (possibility of nontermination). Establishes the FLP impossibility separating asynchronous from synchronous/Byzantine solutions.
(summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Paper ID
639
Venue
PODS
Year
1983
Pagerank
0.00019173482
Overall Rank
400 | 97.26%
DOI
10.1145/588058.588060
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
BibTeX Citation
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@inproceedings{fischer_pods83,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '83},
title = {{Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/588058.588060},
doi = {10.1145/588058.588060},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Fischer, Michael J. and Lynch, Nancy A. and Paterson, Michael S.},
year = {1983}
}
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