Abstract
At the heart of distributed computing lies the fundamental result that the level of agreement that can be obtained in an asynchronous shared memory model where t processes can crash is exactly t + 1. In other words, an adversary that can crash any subset of size at most t can prevent the processes from agreeing on t values. But what about the remaining (\(2^{2^n} -n\)) adversaries that might crash certain combination of processes and not others?
This paper presents a precise way to characterize such adversaries by introducing the notion of disagreement power: the biggest integer k for which the adversary can prevent processes from agreeing on k values. We show how to compute the disagreement power of an adversary and how this notion enables to derive n equivalence classes of adversaries.
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Delporte-Gallet, C., Fauconnier, H., Guerraoui, R., Tielmann, A. (2009). The Disagreement Power of an Adversary. In: Keidar, I. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5805. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04355-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04355-0_6
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