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2023 Turing award: Avi Wigderson wins computer science prize for his work on understanding how randomness can shape and improve computer algorithms

Avi Wigderson has won the 2023 Turing award for his work on understanding how randomness can shape and improve computer algorithms

Computers work in a predictable way at the hardware level, but this can make it difficult for them to model real-world problems, which often have elements of randomness and unpredictability. Wigderson, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, has shown over a decades-long career that computers can also harness randomness in the algorithms that they run. Wigderson first started exploring the relationship between randomness and computers in the 1980s, before the internet existed, and was attracted to the ideas he worked on by intellectual curiosity, rather than how they might be used.

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