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How randomness improves algorithms (2023)
Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.
In all these cases, plugging in random numbers at certain steps in the algorithm helps researchers account for uncertainty about the many ways that complex processes can play out. In 1994, the computer scientists Noam Nisan and Avi Wigderson helped resolve this confusion by demonstrating that randomness, though useful, probably isn’t necessary. But even though they couldn’t find the best set of segments to delete, they could prove that most random choices would be pretty good, and that was enough to break the self-referential loop.
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