Computers appear to be systematic, intentional, and entirely predictable. However, it can also behave in completely random ways. As researchers build increasingly powerful machines, one key question is: What role will randomness play?
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year's Turing Award will be awarded to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness. announced that it would.
The Turing Award, also called the Nobel Prize in computing, carries a prize of $1 million. The award is named after Alan Turing, a British mathematician who helped lay the foundations of modern computing in the mid-20th century.
Other recent honorees include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery (CGI) that drives modern film and television, and AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio. Chatbots like ChatGPT.
Although computers generally behave in a deterministic way (meaning they follow predictable patterns set by their creators), scientists have shown that random behavior can also help solve some problems. In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Wigderson said randomness plays an important role in smartphone applications, cloud computing systems, microprocessors, and more.
“It’s everywhere,” he said.
Randomness is essential in encryption, where unique digital keys are used to lock data and applications. Algorithms involving random behavior can also help analyze complex situations, such as stock market activity, storms sweeping across the country, or the spread of disease.
Dr. Wigderson, a professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was one of a group of scholars who published a series of papers exploring the role of randomness in solving very difficult problems such as predicting the weather or finding cures. cancer.
Madhu Sudan, a theoretical computer scientist at Harvard University, said the ultimate lesson of the study is that computers can solve many complex problems that humans will never fully understand, but some will remain a mystery even to machines.
“It shows that there are many things that can be solved with computers,” said Dr. Sudan. “It also shows that these advances will not be infinite.”