Computers appear methodical, deliberate, and completely predictable. But sometimes it behaves completely randomly. As researchers build increasingly powerful machines, one important question is: What role does randomness play?
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest association for computing professionals, announced that this year's Turing Award will be awarded to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist specializing in randomness. .
The Turing Award, also known as the Nobel Prize of computing, carries a prize of $1 million. The award is named after Alan Turing, a British mathematician who helped create the foundations of modern computing in the mid-20th century.
Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery (CGI) that powers modern film and television, and AI researchers Jeffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Joshua Including Mr. Bengio. Chatbots like ChatGPT.
Computers typically operate in a deterministic manner. That is, it follows a predictable pattern set by its creator, but scientists have also shown that random behavior can help solve some problems. Dr. Wigderson said in an interview with the New York Times that randomness plays a role in things like smartphone applications, cloud computing systems and microprocessors.
“It’s everywhere,” he said.
Randomness is essential to encryption, and unique digital keys are used to lock down data and applications. Algorithms with random behavior can also help analyze complex situations such as stock market activity, storms moving across the country, and the spread of disease.
Dr. Wigderson, a professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is one of a group of scholars who have published a series of papers examining the role of randomness in solving extremely difficult problems, such as predicting the weather and finding cures. was. For cancer.
Madhu Sudan, a theoretical computer scientist at Harvard University, said the ultimate takeaway from this study is that while computers can solve many complex problems that humans will never fully understand, some things can't be done by machines. He said that it remains a mystery even for the Japanese.
“This shows that there are many things that computers can solve,” Dr. Sudan says. “This also shows that this progress is not limitless.”
