Computers seem methodical, deliberate and highly predictable. But they can also act in ways that are completely random. As researchers build increasingly powerful machines, an important question is: What role will randomness play?
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinerythe world’s largest society of computing professionals, has announced that this year’s Turing Award will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness.
Often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award carries a $1 million prize. The award is named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped create the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century.
Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery, or CGI, that drives modern movies and television, and AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, who nurtured techniques that gave birth to chatbots like ChatGPT.
Although computers typically behave in deterministic ways — that is, they follow a predictable pattern set by their creators — scientists have also shown that random behavior can help solve some problems. In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Wigderson that randomness plays a role in smartphone applications, cloud computing systems, microprocessors and more.
“It’s everywhere,” he said.
Randomness is important in cryptography, where unique digital keys are used to lock down data and applications. Algorithms that involve random behavior can also help analyze complex situations, such as stock market activity, a hurricane moving across a country or the spread of diseases.
Dr. Wigderson, a mathematics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, is among a group of academics who have published a series of papers that explore the role of randomness in solving extremely difficult problems, such as predicting the weather or finding a cure. for cancer.
The ultimate lesson of this work, says Madhu Sudan, a theoretical computer scientist at Harvard University, is that computers can solve many complex problems that humans will never fully understand, but some things will remain a mystery, even on machines.
“It shows that there are many things we can solve with computers,” said Dr. Sudan. “It also shows that this progress will not be without limits.”
