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On the Importance of Having an Identity or, is Consensus really Universal?

Harry Buhrman·Alessandro Panconesi·Riccardo Silvestri·Paul Vitanyi
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Abstract

We show that Naming-- the existence of distinct IDs known to all-- is a hidden but necessary assumption of Herlihy's universality result for Consensus. We then show in a very precise sense that Naming is harder than Consensus and bring to the surface some important differences existing between popular shared memory models.

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Harry Buhrman, Alessandro Panconesi, Riccardo Silvestri, Paul Vitanyi. 2002-02-04. On the Importance of Having an Identity or, is Consensus really Universal?. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0201006

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