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The Two Generals Problem was the first widely-known distributed consensus problem, described in 1978 by Jim Gray (although it previously appeared under a different name).

The setup of the problem is that we have two generals on opposite sides of an enemy army, who must choose whether to attack the army or retreat. If only one general attacks, his troops will be slaughtered. So the generals need to reach agreement on their strategy.

To complicate matters, the generals can only communicate by sending messages by (unreliable) carrier pigeon. We also suppose that at some point each general must make an irrevocable decision to attack or retreat. The interesting property of the problem is that if carrier pigeons can become lost, there is no protocol that guarantees agreement in all cases unless the outcome is predetermined (e.g. the generals always attack no matter what happens). The essential idea of the proof is that any protocol that does guarantee agreement can be shortened by deleting the last message; iterating this process eventually leaves a protocol with no messages; for a more rigorous proof (and presentation of the problem), see the section on coordinated attack in IndistinguishabilityProofs or the discussion in LynchBook Section 5.1 that this section is based on.


CategoryDistributedComputingNotes


2014-06-17 11:58