alt Hacker NewsThis line made me pause:
"We prove that for any non-zero stage success probability, the system reaches the verified state almost surely"
What's the point if its still stochastic?
Replies
IanCal • yesterday at 8:22 PM
Hash collisions are possible but can be provably so rare that they’re not a relevant concern.
"almost surely" means "happens with a probability 1", which in infinite set contexts doesn't mean that there aren't other outcomes, but that they have probability 0.
So like, imagine that you had some finite list of integers, and you were picking a random number from 0 to infinity - because the domain is infinite, any finite set has 0 probability, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely