Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
Summary
The post proposes modifying Raft by using finite projective planes to allow progress with a minority of active nodes through pairwise-intersecting voting blocs. It walks through the Fano plane example, Spot It!, and the general construction, then analyzes the trade-offs with probabilistic bounds (via the Erdős–Ko–Rado framework). The result is a provocative look at alternative quorum systems and their implications for safety and availability in distributed systems.