Loved this post! I've been thinking about some tangential ideas lately but probably won't end up writing something myself. Here are a few other ways I've found that randomness can benefit science:
Randomness may result in faster algorithms for some computations
I don't (yet!) have the background to understand the mathematics behind this quanta article, but apparently randomness can provide algorithmic speedup for computations as orderly/un-random seeming as linear systems. I don't think it has been proven that the current fastest algorithm for this computation (which uses randomness in its solution) is the best possible, but this solution seems to point in that direction.
Also consider Shor's algorithm's speedup on finding prime numbers, which is... (read more)
Loved this post! I've been thinking about some tangential ideas lately but probably won't end up writing something myself. Here are a few other ways I've found that randomness can benefit science:
Randomness may result in faster algorithms for some computations
I don't (yet!) have the background to understand the mathematics behind this quanta article, but apparently randomness can provide algorithmic speedup for computations as orderly/un-random seeming as linear systems. I don't think it has been proven that the current fastest algorithm for this computation (which uses randomness in its solution) is the best possible, but this solution seems to point in that direction.
Also consider Shor's algorithm's speedup on finding prime numbers, which is... (read more)