alt Hacker NewsI am a Lamport admirer.
I gradually realized that Lamport is more of the godfather of distributed system than Hinton is to deep learning. Lamport is less prominent than Shannon is to information theory. Shannon is the closest to any title of "gold-like" figure to a scientific discipline of universal relevance in modern society.
Lamport specifically revealed a philosophical connections between computer systems and physics, in the parallel of distributed consensus to relativity theory. To me, the enlightenment is that, the relations between events happening in a distributed system, is more fundamental than their absolute ordering, thus the central role of an "observer". I haven't really analyzed if this realization is from Lamport's papers, or my general reading and thinking, but I am moderately confident that general readings are heavily influenced by Lamport's papers, or can be traced back to be compatible with Lamport's thinking. I have not seriously study if this connection is valid in depth, which might be another pure amateur speculation of mine.
One thing I think Lamport falls short is that his writing is not easy to read and understand. I unconciously feel that Lamport (and Dario from Anthropic) probably share a hidden sense of intellectual supriority grew from their own experience throughout their career. So their writing (and Dario's gospel) all share a unchangable sense of narration from their own delicate and graceful ideas, much less of faciliating the understanding to their audience. In this cateogry, Shannon is abosolutely superior in any measure, in his writing, ideas are so naturally presented, although the implications of the ideas remain elusive due to the inherent depth.
Also, among the 3 prominent figures of modern AI: Hinton/Bengio are more like Shannon, Lecun is closer to Lamport.
Enough random rambling. Lamport, as indicated by the outweight presence in this list, is no doubt the single most important scientist in distributed systems.
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Hot take of the day:
Computer scientists are in denial about it, but CS is a branch of theoretical physics, not mathematics. You can point to this or that model of computation, such as lambda calculus or mu-recursive functions and try to claim its abstracted well beyond the particular laws of physics for some specific universe, but they all have some kind of rate limit built into them... and where does the motivation for this idea, that it takes something (time, space, work) to compute something ultimately come from? That's right - from underlying physics itself[1] - from the Bekenstein bound or Bremermann's limit or the like.
Even apparently non-physically-realizable models of computation like non-deterministic Turing machines are ultimately informed by and motivated by concepts in physics... otherwise they would just be examples of chmess[2] and of no interest to anyone. Computer science is of course somewhat abstracted from the details, but no more so than, say, thermodynamics, where concepts like entropy or Gibbs free energy can be studied in the abstract without reference to whether we are talking about a gas of non-interacting molecules or the spins of a bunch of electrons trapped in a lattice.
So, it's of no surprise whatsoever that the fundamental problems of distributed computing are ultimately the same as those found in the relativity of simultaneity[3]. You've all been studying the same things all along, just with different tools and at different levels of abstraction.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
[2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
> the relations between events happening in a distributed system, is more fundamental than their absolute ordering
The important thing in most distributed systems is having an order. Having a single observer serialize events as it receives them is so much more tractable than trying to use absolute order. Using absolute order requires very precise time synchronization which is hard; using absolute order requires knowing when you have received all the reports of events that already happened which is hard. Determining a designated observer isn't typically easy, but having it determine the order it observes events is easy. If two events happen at a similar time it's typically not a big deal which one is considered first as long as all nodes will agree on the result --- let the designated observer just pick the first one it sees works pretty well. If your report takes an unexpectedly long time to make it to the designated observer, then it won't be first and you'll deal.
Much better than trying to figure out unknowable questions of relativity. :P