[bkirwi]

There you go.[0] I believe it's called the 'arbiter problem' in that context, and your description seems basically correct.

[0]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b...

[Animats]

Yes. This is a well known problem. See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbiter_[electronics]). It's not possible to build an arbiter which will reliably decide who wins in a fixed time. It is, however, possible to design one which can detect that the arbiter hasn't stabilized yet and delays until it has. All multiprocessor shared-memory systems need this.

[schoen]

Whoa, that paper is fascinating!

I'm trying to improve my intuition for why the physical exmaples in it are right. I found the examples of inevitable crashes and collisions disconcerting.