The Lambda Calculus uses simple replacement to compute expressions. However, it does not define a way to replace a parameter of a function with the function itself. That would seem to make it impossible to write recursive functions. However, with a clever bit of self-application, we can define a function that makes any other function recursive. This is the Y-Combinator. Claude Shannon told us that it was important to keep equivocation high in order to make a cypher difficult to crack. In the second half of his paper, he tells us how to do that. We need to diffuse the message, and we need to confuse the key. Doing these two things will destroy the statistical patterns of the message so that the only possible attack is brute force. The Two Generals problem has no solution. But does that mean that we cannot guarantee that a distributed system will reach consensus? Not at all. By applying two simplifying assumptions, we reduce the problem to one that can be solved with a very simple protoc
