Risk-limited indulgent permissivism

Indulgent Algorithms ∗ ( Extended

Informally, an indulgent algorithm is a distributed algorithm that tolerates unreliable failure detection: the algorithm is indulgent towards its failure detector. This paper formally characterizes such algorithms and states some of their interesting features. We show that indulgent algorithms are inherently safe and uniform. We also state impossibility results for indulgent solutions to diverg...

The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus

This paper presents a simple framework unifying a family of consensus algorithms that can tolerate process crash failures and asynchronous periods of the network, also called indulgent consensus algorithms. Key to the framework is a new abstraction we introduce here, called Alpha, and which precisely captures consensus safety. Implementations of Alpha in shared memory, storage area network, mes...

Permissivism and the arbitrariness objection

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication ...

On the Message Complexity of Indulgent Consensus

Many recommend planning for the worst and hoping for the best. In this paper we devise efficient indulgent consensus algorithms that can tolerate crash failures and arbitrarily long periods of asynchrony, and yet perform (asymptotically) optimally in well-behaved, synchronous executions with few failures. We present two such algorithms: In synchronous executions, the first has optimal message c...

Fast Indulgent Consensus with Zero Degradation