Another one for the list: <a href="https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi09/cse223a/p145-maekawa.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi09/cse223a/p145-maekawa.pd...</a><p>I remember thinking it was a really cool result in college.<p>Further, I’m not sure if there’s a good paper for it, but the Gossip protocols are another fun rabbit hole.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol</a><p>It’s one of those beautiful ideas that isn’t practical for Serious Work™ (i.e. centralized computation), because it’s hard to make SLA-style guarantees about a system that communicates by gossip.<p>But it does seem to mimic nature in that while it’s not optimal for performance it’s quite robust to things like highly dynamic connectivity between nodes. Maybe one day it’ll have practical value, when the world is a bit more decentralized! :)