Friday Squid Blogging: SqUID Bots

They’re AI warehouse robots.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Tags: AI, robotics, squid

Posted on April 5, 2024 at 5:02 PM • 117 Comments

emily's post • April 10, 2024 8:48 PM

Dept. of Computational Theology, Course 01010, lecturer John von Neumann

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Computer scientist wins Turing Award for seminal work on randomness

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/computer-scientist-wins-turing-award-for-seminal-work-on-randomness/

While computers are fundamentally deterministic systems, researchers discovered in the 1970s that they could enrich their algorithms by letting them make random choices during computation in hopes of improving their efficiency.

…

In 1994, Wigderson co-authored a seminal paper on hardness versus randomness with Noam Nisan, demonstrating that as useful as randomness can be, it is not a necessity. Essentially, “Every probabilistic algorithm that’s efficient can be replaced by a deterministic one, so you don’t really need [randomness],” he said. “The power believed to be in probabilistic algorithms doesn’t exist.” He subsequently coauthored two more highly influential papers further extending that work on randomness, among many others.

emily's post • April 11, 2024 5:40 AM

Further re the non-necessity of randomness from

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/computer-scientist-wins-turing-award-for-seminal-work-on-randomness/

One central theme is that computation happens everywhere, not just in computers,” Wigderson told Ars. “It is part of the processes in our brain, the way we can talk and the cells in our body, but also trees growing or weather and celestial things. In all these natural processes, there are the laws of nature, which are local, and they evolve systems. Like in a computer, there are very simple rules, and you start with a problem and discover a complex solution to it. So, the methodology is applicable to essentially any science process or study.

What does this say about the theory of evolution as a long term process driven by random inputs ? The path in biological space attributed to a random mechanism may be generated instead by a non-random dynamical process. Complex and chaotic deterministic dynamical systems may appear random.