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From: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Complexity Philosophy
Message-ID: <19233@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Wed, 3-Jun-87 17:52:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19233
Posted: Wed Jun  3 17:52:17 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Jun-87 04:38:07 EDT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Tom Tedrick)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 13
Keywords: Zero Knowledge Interactive Proof Systems

Well, one example (out of many that I have pondered) of
aspects of complexity theory that seem relevant to philosophy
is the so-called "Zero Knowledge Interactive Proof Systems"
(developed between 1983 and 1986 and currently a hot research area).

Using these things you can prove (probabalistically, with exponentially
small probability of error) that a theorem is true without giving
away any new information about the proof, except that it exists.

These things really bothered me when I first heard about them,
but now I am kind of fascinated by them. It seems to me that we
have had basically one notion of mathematical proof since Euclid,
and now after 2000+ years all of a sudden a new notion of proof appears.