Why Extension-Based Proofs Fail Dan Alistarh James Aspnes Faith Ellen IST Austria Yale University of Toronto
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Rati Gelashvili Leqi Zhu University of Toronto University of Michigan
[email protected] [email protected] August 2, 2020 Abstract We introduce extension-based proofs, a class of impossibility proofs that includes valency arguments. They are modelled as an interaction between a prover and a protocol. Using proofs based on combinatorial topology, it has been shown that it is impossible to deterministically solve k-set agreement among n > k 2 processes in a wait-free manner in certain asynchronous models. However, it was unknown whether≥ proofs based on simpler techniques were possible. We show that this impossibility result cannot be obtained for one of these models by an extension- based proof and, hence, extension-based proofs are limited in power. 1 Introduction One of the most well-known results in the theory of distributed computing, due to Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson [FLP85], is that there is no deterministic, wait-free protocol solving consensus among n 2 processes in an asynchronous message passing system, even if at most one process may ≥ crash. Their result has been extended to asynchronous shared memory systems where processes communicate by reading from and writing to shared registers [Abr88, CIL87, Her91, LAA87]. Moses and Rajsbaum [MR02] gave a unified framework for proving the impossibility of consensus in a number of different systems. Chaudhuri [Cha93] conjectured that the impossibility of consensus could be generalized to the k-set agreement problem.