Derivation of Bakken’s Razor

David E. Bakken, Ph.D.

2011

Occam’s Razor, also called the law of parsimony, can be summarized as follows:

(1) A simpler explanation is to be preferred

Hanlon’s Razor is a corollary of this, and reads:

(2) Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

In its essence, a computer network gets bytes of data from point A to point B. A distributed computing system is one where multiple computers are connected by a network and communicate only by passing messages (not, for example, by shared memory).

The field of distributed computing is thus a layer on top of computer networking which reasons about how to have different distributed applications programs coordinate, synchronize, replicate, and the like. One of the fundamental principles of distributed computing can be summarized in layman’s terms as follows:

(3) A client program sending a request to a server program cannot tell if the request message was dropped, the server has crashed, or the reply message was dropped. All it can tell is that it did not get a reply.

Translating (2) from the value domain to the time domain using (3), we have Bakken’s Razor:

(4) Never attribute to indifference that which is adequately explained by overload.

The term Bakken’s Razor is quite ironic, because Bakken has not used a razor in two decades, though he was willing to had he lost a bet on a WSU Football game.