In the known paper Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with one Faulty Process (JACM85), FLP (Fisher, Lynch and Paterson) proved the surprising result that no completely asyn
D
(the set of possible configurations after applying e
to elements of C
) contains both 0-valent and 1-valent configurations (and is assumed to contain no bivalent configurations).
That is — e
maps every element in C
to either a 0-valent or a 1-valent configuration. By definition of C
, there must be a root element that is connected to all other elements by a series of "neighbour" relationships, so there must be a boundary point where an element in C
that leads to a 0-valent configuration after e
is neighbours with an element in C
that leads to a 1-valent configuration after e
.