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I disagree. This paper generalizes variants of Paxos - certainly not the class of all consensus algorithms. Moreoever, it generalizes Paxos variants, with diffe

I disagree. This paper generalizes variants of Paxos - certainly not the class of all consensus algorithms. Moreoever, it generalizes Paxos variants, with different requirements - weaker quorums are always a tradeoff with liveness in the presense of faults. tldr; I don't see world-changing novelty here, theoretically. There are dozens of other consensus algorithms in the world, some randomized, some not quorum based, etc. This is interesting if you're in Paxos land, trying to tune your Paxos for different fault-tolerance requirements. It's no way comparable to a computational model.

DannyBee 8y ago
"This paper generalizes variants of Paxos - certainly not the class of all consensus algorithms." This is not true. It generalizes quite many more than that. It happens to use PaxOS as examples.
- Vervious 8y ago
  It generalizes specifically a class of consensus algorithms that write to sequences of registers in a monotonic way, such that if a "previous" register decides v, future "registers" and associated quorums will decide v. This is not a property of all consensus algorithms. Consensus algorithms don't need to behave this way. Paxos and derivatives behave this way, but I'm not sure Raft, etc. slide in as neatly (that would require a substantial analysis). In particular, this generalization does not capture any nondeterministic algorithm, any algorithm tolerating Byzantine faults (or various other consensus problems), any non-quorum based algorithm, Nakamoto style (which is a byzantine consensus algorithm), Ben-Orr, etc. etc. So, my question for you: what other algorithms do you think this paper generalizes, that are useful outside of the narrow scope of optimizing Paxos?