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Knowledge in shared memory systems

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Summary

We study the relation between knowledge and space. That is, we analyze how much shared memory space is needed in order to learn certain kinds of facts. Such results are useful tools for reasoning about shared memory systems. In addition we generalize a known impossibility result, and show that results about how knowledge can be gained and lost in message passing systems also hold for shared memory systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AT & T Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, 07974, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

    Michael Merritt & Gadi Taubenfeld

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  1. Michael Merritt
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  2. Gadi Taubenfeld
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Michael Merritt received a B.S. degree in Philosophy and in Computer Science from Yale College in 1978, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Information and Computer Science in 1980 and 1983, respectively, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 1983 he has been a member of technical staff at AT & T Bell Laboratories, and has taught as an adjunct or visiting lecturer at Stevens Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. In 1989 he was program chair for the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. His research interests include distributed and concurrent computation, both algorithms and formal methods for verifying their correctness, cryptography, and security. He is an editor for Distributed Computing and for Information and Computation, recently co-authored a book on database concurrency control algorithms, and is a member of the ACM and of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Gadi Taubenfeld received the B.A., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), in 1982, 1984 and 1988, respectively. From 1988 to 1990 he was a research scientist at Yale University. Since 1991 he has been a member of technical staff at AT & T Bell Laboratories. His primary research interests are in concurrent and distributed computing.

A preliminary version of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 189–200, Montreal, Canada, August 1991

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Merritt, M., Taubenfeld, G. Knowledge in shared memory systems. Distrib Comput 7, 99–109 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02280839

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