This is a draft of an article to appear in the October 2022 issue of the Notices of the AMS. In this survey article we explore a fascinating area called descriptive combinatorics and its recently discovered connections to distributed algorithms -- a fundamental part of computer science that is becoming increasingly important in the modern era of decentralized computation. In the first part of the article we give a brief introduction to some of the central notions and problems of descriptive combinatorics. The second part is devoted to an overview of some of the results concerning the interactions between descriptive combinatorics and distributed algorithms, as well as a few open problems. The article should be accessible to readers with little to no background in either descriptive set theory or computer science.

翻译：这是在2022年10月的《AMS通知》中出现的一篇文章的草案。在这个调查文章中,我们探讨了一个令人着迷的领域,叫做描述性组合法,以及它最近发现的与分布式算法的连接。这是计算机科学的一个基本组成部分,在现代分散计算时代越来越重要。在文章的第一部分,我们简要地介绍了描述性组合法的一些核心概念和问题。第二部分专门概述了描述性组合法和分布式算法之间相互作用的一些结果,以及一些公开的问题。在描述性理论或计算机科学方面,读者应该能够查阅该文章,而读者应该几乎没有或根本没有背景。