Coding Theory Meets Theoretical Computer Science: by Sara Robinson
Coding Theory Meets Theoretical Computer Science: by Sara Robinson
2
Shaltiel of Hebrew University and Christopher Umans of Microsoft Research—also shows how Reed–Muller codes can be used to
build a new type of pseudo-random number generator.
The recent flurry of research connecting codes and sources of randomness, on top of the earlier links between codes and
combinatorial objects, seems to hint at the possibility of a broader theory, which researchers are only beginning to elucidate. “It’s
certainly at a point where codes are indispensable as a tool,” says Umans, who considers any further comments at this point premature.
But for Sudan, the connections found so far suggest that something deeper is going on. “For some mysterious reason, every notion
from extremal combinatorics that computer scientists have gotten entangled with turned out be some form of error-correcting code,”
he says. “In many cases, the mere realization that a problem can be related to coding theory was the solution.”
Sara Robinson is a freelance writer and part-time journalist-in-residence at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley.