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Consensus Algorithms
Distributed agreement mechanisms for multi-agent decision making
In 30 seconds
- What
- Multiple agents vote or propose decisions, weighted by confidence or stake, until reaching agreement despite some agents failing or acting maliciously.
- When to use
- Distributed systems where no single agent is trusted, and you need binding decisions that survive agent failures or Byzantine behavior.
- Watch out
- Consensus overhead grows exponentially with agent count; slow convergence or deadlock under adversarial conditions wastes compute and delays decisions.
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Consensus Algorithms: Overview
Distributed agreement mechanisms for multi-agent decision making
- Byzantine fault tolerance
- Voting mechanisms
- Conflict resolution
- Agreement protocols
- Distributed consensus
- Finality guarantees
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
- Weighted Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus Protocol (Kumar et al., 2023)
- Paxos Made Simple (Lamport, 2001)
- In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft) - Ongaro & Ousterhout (2014)
- Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) - Castro & Liskov (1999)
- HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of BlockchainarXiv:1803.05069
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