This snippet from the article: > In 1994, the computer scientists Noam Nisan and Avi Wigderson helped resolve this confusion by demonstrating that randomness,

This snippet from the article: > In 1994, the computer scientists Noam Nisan and Avi Wigderson helped resolve this confusion by demonstrating that randomness, though useful, probably isn’t necessary. They proved that one of two things must be true: Either all problems that can be efficiently solved using randomness also have fast deterministic algorithms, or many notoriously difficult problems are secretly easy. Computer scientists consider the second possibility very unlikely. Reminds me of the popular hacker koan: > In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?" asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?" asked Minsky. Sussman replied, "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty," replied Minsky. At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.