Lecture 14 — October 30 , 2012

In the previous lecture, we began our discussion of pseudorandomness. We presented the BlumMicali definition of a pseudorandom generator, which defines pseudorandomness in terms of how hard it is for members of a specific computation class to distinguish between true randomness and generated randomness. We proved Yao’s theorem, which provides a link between the existence of certain pseudorandom generators and the equivalence of certain complexity classes. Finally, we presented the Nisan-Wigderson pseudorandom generator which (if the Nisan-Wigderson assumption holds) will imply that BPP = P .