The ACM has a short, delightful video featuring Leslie Lamport talking about his recent discovery of a surprising connection between two of his papers from the 1970s. Those papers, one usually called the Bakery algorithm and the other usually called the Time Clocks paper are well known within the distributed computing community and are still studied today.
The Bakery algorithm, that Irreal discussed previously, ensures that distributed processes execute a critical region one at a time. The Time Clocks paper discusses a distributed state machine algorithm. Lamport, in the process of writing a recent paper, discovered that the two algorithms are related and that each can be derived from the other.
Lamport explains this in a paper in the latest (September 2022) Communications of the ACM. The paper itself is here. The video is only 3 minutes 14 seconds long so it will be easy to find time for it.
Emacsers will enjoy discovering that Lamport is an Emacs user. Mechanical keyboard aficionados will appreciate his choice of an IBM Model M, which as everyone knows, is the worlds best keyboard. Finally, for those Math nerds who, like me, are lusting after his “You want proof?” T-shirt, you can get them from Cotton Expressions.