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https://blog.the-pans.com/understanding-paxos/ https://blog.the-pans.com/understanding-paxos/ It’s much easier to understand Paxos as a read-modify-write trans
by aptxkid 6y ago
https://blog.the-pans.com/understanding-paxos/ https://blog.the-pans.com/understanding-paxos/
It’s much easier to understand Paxos as a read-modify-write transaction. I wrote to Lamport about it. Here’s part of Lamport’s reply
It’s nice that you found an apparently new way to explain Paxos, but don’t expect everyone to find it helpful. “Grasping” or “intuitively understanding” an algorithm really means giving the reader a warm fuzzy feeling, and different people get warm fuzzy feelings from different things. What really matters is not warm fuzzy feelings, but the ability to rigorously prove that a correct algorithm is correct, and to find the error in an incorrect one.
- badtuple 6y agoThat's awesome! Thanks for the new framing of the algorithm. Lamport's reply seems unnecessarily dismissive. It's true that different framings and analogy are "weaker" than rigorous understanding. But they are also pathways to it! Digging into something complex is hard, and having a mental model of which pieces interact together and why is one way to make it approachable enough to actually get into the proofs and the rigor.