A hundred impossibility proofs for distributed computing

Abstract

Abstract : This talk is about impossibility results in the area of distributed computing. In this category, I include not just results that say that a particular task cannot be accomplished, but also lower bound results, which say that a task cannot be accomplished within a certain bound on cost. I started out with a simple plan for preparing this talk: I would spend a couple of weeks reading all the impossibility proofs in our fields, and would categorize them according to the ideas used. Then I would make wise and general observations, and try to predict where the future of this area is headed. That turned out to be a bit too ambitious; there are many more such results than I thought. Although it is often hard to say what constitutes ad different results, I managed to count over 100 such impossibility proofs And my search wasn't even very systematic or exhaustive. It's not quite as hopeless to understand this area as it might seem from the number of papers. Although there are 100 different results, there aren't 100 different ideas. I thought I could contribute something by identifying some of the commonality among the different results.