10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls
Monday, July 30, 2012 - 10:02
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org) -- Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, theyre just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems.