Is the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps more importantly – can we tell the difference between the two? Humanity has pondered the meaning and utility of randomness for millennia. There is a remarkable variety of ways in which we utilize perfect coin tosses to our advantage: in statistics, cryptography, game theory, algorithms, gambling… Indeed, randomness seems indispensable!
Which of these applications survive if the universe had no randomness in it at all? Which of them survive if only poor-quality randomness is available., e.g. that arises from “unpredictable” phenomena like the weather or the stock market?
A computational theory of randomness developed in the past four decades, reveals (perhaps counter-intuitively) that very little is lost in such deterministic or weekly random worlds. In the talk I’ll explain the main ideas and results of this theory.