Alt Text: Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician, won what's known as "the Nobel Prize of computing" for his work on randomness.
You jest but the kind of stuff this guy works on is actually really fascinating
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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I believe it. I had a professor in college who said if he found a genie he would wish for 3 different sets of truly random data lol
Would they still be random after the genie gave them to him?
Okay, Schrodinger
The just followed the rabbit hole that started with reading "teh pengu1n of d00m"
This was literally a talk this year at sigbovik https://twitch.tv/videos/2111841043 (skip to around 1hr 57 min)
It's a fascinating field! Simplified: Make a machine that it is impossible to guess the likely outcome of with odds larger than 50/50.
We are talking any tiny advantageous guess here. If I predict 50/50 that a coin will go heads up, slight imbalances will cause it to go heads on average 51 times out of 100 tosses. Play for a dollar a million times, and I'm rich.
And if I know roughly how you will toss the coin, I can improve my prediction another tiny amount by knowing which side was up when you lift it up to toss it.
The field is about making a process that successfuly hides information so I can't know what state the internal workings of the coin tosser is at any time. It has huge overlap with cryptography.
Makes sense, it's very hard for computers to be really random.