[EM] Scientific American and the "Perfect Electoral System"

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2023-11-07 16:27, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> One of my favorites in this respect is that the FLP impossibility 
> theorem says that deterministic asynchronous consensus of a distributed 
> system is impossible. However, by using randomization, you can get close 
> enough to certainty quickly enough that it doesn't matter.

Some quotes from https://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/01/12/ben-or.html

"My attitude was along these lines:

 > What good are impossibility results, anyway? They don’t seem very
 > useful at first, since they don’t allow computers to do anything they
 > couldn’t previously.

Following that question (in Section 3.5 of A Hundred Impossibility 
Proofs), Lynch goes on to justify the importance of impossibility 
proofs. The whole case is worth reading, but the one that resonates with 
me most strongly as a practitioner is:

 >    ... the effect of the impossibility result might be to make a
 > systems developer clarify his/her claims about what the system
 > accomplishes.

(...)

... we need to be careful to not over- or understate what various 
results actually mean. It’s possible, and actually extremely common, to 
read the CAP and FLP results to mean something like distributed 
consensus is impossible, when they actually mean /exactly this problem 
is impossible in exactly this system model/. These results should only 
be extended to other problems and other models with care."

-km