Contradiction in Lamport’s Paxos made simple paper

You missed something in step 7. When C processes accept 100:b it sets its state to C(100:b,100). By accepting a value the node is also promising to not accept earlier values.


Update. I’ve been thinking about this all month because I knew the above answer was not absolutely correct.

What’s more I looked through several proprietary and open-source paxos implementations and they all had the bug submitted by the OP!

So here’s the correct answer, when viewed entirely from Paxos Made Simple:

If the proposer receives a response to its prepare requests (numbered n) from a majority of acceptors, then it sends an accept request to each of those acceptors for a proposal numbered n with a value v, where v is the value of the highest-numbered proposal among the responses, or is any value if the responses reported no proposals. (emphasis mine)

In other words, the proposer can only send Accept messages to acceptors that it has received Promises from for that ballot number.

So, is this a contradiction in Lamport’s paper? Right now, I’m saying yes.


If you look at Lamport’s paxos proofs he treats an accept as a promise, just as my original answer suggests. But this is not pointed out in Paxos Made Simple. In fact, it appears Lamport took great pains to specify that an accept was not a promise.

The problem is when you combine the weaker portions of both variants; as the OP did and several implementations do. Then you run into this catastrophic bug.

Leave a Comment

Hata!: SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] Access denied for user 'divattrend_liink'@'localhost' (using password: YES)