A Short Visit to Distributed Computing Where Simplicity Is Considered a First Class Property

Similarly to the injunction “Know yourself” engraved on the frontispiece of Delphi’s temple more than two millennia ago, the sentence “Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler” (attributed to Einstein) should be engraved on the entrance door of all research laboratories. At the long run, what does remain of our work? Mathematicians and physicists have formulas. We have algorithms! The main issue with simplicity is that it is often confused with triviality, but as stated by J. Perlis, the recipient of the first Turing Award, “Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it”. Considering my research domain, namely distributed computing, this chapter surveys topics I was interested in during my career and presents a few results, approaches, and algorithms I designed (with colleagues). The design of these algorithms strove to consider (maybe unsuccessfully) concision, generality, simplicity, and elegance as first class properties. Said in other words, this chapter does not claim objectivity.