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Who invented vector clocks?

decomposition.al

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Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#11

Post by lallysingh »

threatofrain wrote: post #5
sublinear wrote: post #3

> So, the current version of the Wikipedia page on vector clocks is wrong, or at least misleading, about the origin of the idea, and it’s kind of my fault. No. 0% fault of the author and 100% the fault of the Wikipedia editor. Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work.

> Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work. This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do t…

Have you tried a simple edit of an article? It'll get reverted under a reference to some policy that links to some giant body of in-group norms for Wiki.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#12

Post by threatofrain »

lallysingh wrote: post #11
threatofrain wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work. This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do t…

Have you tried a simple edit of an article? It'll get reverted under a reference to some policy that links to some giant body of in-group norms for Wiki.

Yes, my math and CS edits on Wikipedia tend to be durable, sometimes more durable than I'd like as I would've wanted a professional in the field to take over. It took me a few hours over the course of a week to appreciate the collection of pros and cons which keeps technical Wikipedia to be what it is.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#13

Post by IIAOPSW »

I mean, if you have multiple different parties each of which might have a slightly different, out of sync copy of a shared reality, the first and most obvious representation of state you could have is just list them all out. Obviously there's at least a half dozen people who had that exact idea around the dawn of the distributed system.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#14

Post by uvdn7 »

The same happens in work place as well, when multiple people have similar ideas and it is unclear or impossible to credit who came up with the idea first. It is often the case that people with shared context had similar ideas independently when facing the same set of problems.

I have the impression that it is controversial about who invented the hybrid logical clock first as well. Although most people cite the Kulkani paper from 2015 I think?

Do people know who else claims to invent HLC first?

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#15

Post by wolfram74 »

gwern wrote: post #6

This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the theory ', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way',…

In free wheeling evolutionary processes, seeing that a process works is enough, but when some level of intentionality can be applied, I feel the group that explains /why/ a process works can offer more to the community for improvement, or realize when all the gains have been found and new avenues must be pursued.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#16

Post by sublinear »

threatofrain wrote: post #5
sublinear wrote: post #3

> So, the current version of the Wikipedia page on vector clocks is wrong, or at least misleading, about the origin of the idea, and it’s kind of my fault. No. 0% fault of the author and 100% the fault of the Wikipedia editor. Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work.

> Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work. This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do t…

> This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better.

The accuracy of an article depends on the effort (or ability) for contributors to check facts more than its "density of interest". In other words, experts find this easier than amateurs, and for most topics I think many would rather see no article than a crap one. Also worth a conjecture that the interest in writing cannot possibly always be equal to the interest in reading for all topics. If true this is perhaps the ugliest aspect of Wikipedia.

> Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do the volunteers not deserve the "privilege" of offering their time for free?

This is a non sequitur and I don't think I can answer it. What I will say is that the code review process for a pull request usually includes making sure docs are updated accordingly. Much of that documentation might even be automatically generated from structured comments and validated by passing tests such as in API docs. Humans still of course review after that which mistakes even less likely especially since everyone involved is writing about their own work.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#17

Post by eru »

gwern wrote: post #6

This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the theory ', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way',…

This reminds me a bit of the relationship between the inventors of various steam engines, and the then fledging science of thermodynamics that sprang up to explain them.

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#18

Post by eru »

iudqnolq wrote: post #10
topaz0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely: assuming all of the authors of the various papers were on earth at the time, the spacetime intervals separating their discoveries were almost certainly timelike, in which case there is no ambiguity in their ordering. Unless they were within a few ms of each other (in the earth's reference frame).

But (taking the joke closer towards absurdity) when using vector timestamps independent actions by people not communicating with each other don't have a well-defined order.

That's true, but I'm not sure you call that point of view a 'reference frame'?

And some of them seem to have talked?

Re: Who invented vector clocks?

#19

Post by mathisfun123 »

gwern wrote: post #6

This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the theory ', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way',…

this is absolutely the opposite how the citation game works - very often the first person to hit the buzzer gets all the credit and the people that come after and actually give a clean, rigorous, expository treatment gets absolutely zero credit/cites.
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