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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 19 2014, @11:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the distributed-accolades dept.

Rashek writes:

"Leslie Lamport, the famous distributed systems researcher best known for his paper The Byzantine Generals Problem [PDF] and as the the initial developer of LaTeX , has been granted the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award 'for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems.'"

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:18PM (#18547)

    From the linked PDF, here's the Byzantine General's Problem:

    "We imagine that several divisions of the Byzantine army are camped outside an enemy city, each division commanded by its own general. The generals can communicate with one another only by messenger. After observing the enemy, they must decide upon a common plan of action. However, some of the generals may be traitors, trying to prevent the loyal generals from reaching agreement. The generals must have an algorithm to guarantee that

    A. All loyal generals decide upon the same plan of action.

    B. A small number of traitors cannot cause the loyal generals to adopt a bad plan."

    I will now have fun imagining malfunctioning networked devices as traitorous generals. :)

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by PoiBoy on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:40PM

    by PoiBoy (3713) on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:40PM (#18560)

    I'm forever grateful for Lamport's development of Latex, making Tex easier for the rest of us!

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:45PM (#18562)

    Is that like the A. B. Nobel prize?

    Glad that A. M. is there so that we wouldn't get confused thinking it was for that OTHER Turing award.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hubie on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:56PM

    by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 19 2014, @02:56PM (#18567) Journal

    Computer science is not my field, so for me this is very informative. I don't know if it is still true today, but at one time pretty much everyone who learned LaTeX knew Lamport's name because they learned it from using his wonderfully concise LaTeX: A Document Preparation System [latex-project.org] . And just like TeX was with Knuth, obviously LaTeX was simply a means to support his real work. After all these years, it is nice to hear what his real work was.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:05PM (#18679)

    Lampson, Thacker, and Lamport
    oh my!

  • (Score: 1) by The_Charmer on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:38PM

    by The_Charmer (3523) on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:38PM (#18692)

    Was there not a recent study where if your product (or idea or point of view) created a "critical mass" of 10% it was theorized that it would then take over? It was on /. somewhere I think...

    • (Score: 1) by The_Charmer on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:47PM

      by The_Charmer (3523) on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:47PM (#18694)

      And the title read: "Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas"...