1993 Gödel Prize

1993 Gödel Prize

László Babai, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Shlomo Moran, and Charles Rackoff

The 1993 Gödel Prize was shared by two papers, László Babai and Shlomo Moran, "Arthur-Merlin games: a randomized proof system and a hierarchy of complexity classes," Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 36 (1988), 254-276, and Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff, "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems," SIAM Journal on Computing 18 (1989), 186-208.

These papers introduced the concept of interactive proof systems, which provides a rich new framework for addressing the question of what constitutes a mathematical proof. The invention of this framework has already led to some of the most exciting developments in complexity theory in recent years, including the discovery of close connections between interactive proof systems and classical complexity classes, and the resolution of several major open problems about the difficulty of finding near-optimal solutions to combinatorial optimization problems.


Created by Ian Parberry, March 24, 1999.
Last updated Wed Mar 24 17:31:35 CST 1999.