Most people still confuse Version Vectors and Vector Clocks. Well, I did confuse them for several years. In fact they look the same and the update rules are almost the same. Both of these mechanism…

Any computing system can be described as executing sequences of actions, with an action being any relevant change in the state of the system. For example, reading a file to memory, modifying the contents of the file in memory, or writing the new contents to the file are relevant actions for a text editor. In a distributed system, actions execute in multiple locations; in this context, actions are often called events. Examples of events in distributed systems include sending or receiving messages, or changing some state in a node. Not all events are related, but some events can cause and influence how other, later events occur. For example, a reply to a received mail message is influenced by that message, and maybe by prior messages received.