Surgeon-General's Report

Byzantine Generals and Transaction Commit Protocols

The transaction commit problem in a distributed database system is an instance of the Weak Byzantine Generals problem. It is shown that even under the assumption that a process can fail only by “crashing”—failing to send any more messages—a solution to this problem that can tolerate k failures must, in the worst case, require at least k + 1 message-passing delays. Under this same assumption, a ...

Authenticated Byzantine Generals in Dual Failure Model

Pease et al. introduced the problem of Byzantine Generals (BGP) to study the effects of Byzantine faults in distributed protocols for reliable broadcast. It is well known that BGP among n players tolerating up to t faults is (efficiently) possible if and only if n > 3t. To overcome this severe limitation, Pease et al. introduced a variant of BGP, Authenticated Byzantine General (ABG). Here play...

On Byzantine generals with alternative plans

This paper proposes a variation of the Byzantine generals problem (or Byzantine consensus). Each general has a set of good plans and a set of bad plans. The problem is to make all loyal generals agree on a good plan proposed by a loyal general, and never on a bad plan.

Surgeon General's report on acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Koop reports to the American people on the AIDS epidemic, including how the disease is transmitted, the relative risks of infection, and how people can protect themselves from infection. He stresses that AIDS is spread through certain high risk sexual behaviors or through the use of shared needles or syringes to inject illicit drugs, and urges that education about preventing AIDS should start ...

Youth violence: a report of the surgeon general.