Computer Science · Distributed Systems
A topic within Distributed Systems, itself one of 13 topics in that field and part of Computer Science.
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak & Marshall Pease · 1982
Proves that reaching agreement in the presence of arbitrarily faulty components requires more than two-thirds of participants to be honest.
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Miguel Castro & Barbara Liskov · 1999
Shows Byzantine agreement can run fast enough for real storage systems, not just as a theoretical possibility, by optimising the common case where no…
4 works
Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak & Marshall Pease
Proves that reaching agreement in the presence of arbitrarily faulty components requires more than two-thirds of participants to be honest.
Assumes no distributed systems background — the problem is posed as a puzzle before any mathematics arrives
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyJim Gray
Analyses real outage data to argue that software bugs and operator mistakes, not hardware, are the dominant cause of system failure, reframing fault tolerance as a software and process problem rather than a hardware one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyMike Burrows
Argues most distributed systems need a small, highly available lock and naming service rather than a full consensus library, and that hiding Paxos behind a simple lock API is what made it usable in practice.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyMiguel Castro & Barbara Liskov
Shows Byzantine agreement can run fast enough for real storage systems, not just as a theoretical possibility, by optimising the common case where no replica is actually faulty.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copy