Randomness and computation

Abstract

The interplay of randomness and computation is at the heart of modern Cryptography and plays a fundamental role in the design of algorithms and in the study of computation at large. Specifically, this interplay is pivotal to several intriguing notions of probabilistic proof systems (e.g., interactive proofs, zero-knowledge proofs, and probabilistically checkable proofs), is the focal of the computational approach to randomness, and is essential for some types of sub-linear time algorithms (e.g., property testers). This essay provides a brief outline of these connections. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.