Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
The work
| Authors | Michael J. Fischer; Nancy Lynch; Michael S. Paterson |
|---|---|
| Type | article |
| Year | 1985 |
| Citekey | fischer1985impossibility |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Journal of the ACM |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 374--382 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1145/3149.214121 |
|---|---|
| OpenAlex | W2035362408 |
Access
| Free full text | https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3149.214121 |
|---|---|
| Landing page | https://doi.org/10.1145/3149.214121 |
Abstract
The consensus problem involves an asynchronous system of processes, some of which may be unreliable. The problem is for the reliable processes to agree on a binary value. In this paper, it is shown that every protocol for this problem has the possibility of nontermination, even with only one faulty process. By way of contrast, solutions are known for the synchronous case, the "Byzantine Generals" problem.
A copy is held
pdf, 708.7 kB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.
How it got here
| How it got here | agent via openalex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-08-05 00:00 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-08-24 07:28 UTC |
Cite it as
@article{fischer1985impossibility,
title = {Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process},
author = {Michael J. Fischer and Nancy Lynch and Michael S. Paterson},
year = {1985},
journal = {Journal of the ACM},
volume = {32},
number = {2},
pages = {374--382},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/3149.214121},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/fischer1985impossibility/ and will keep doing so.