Yuri Gurevich

"Impugning Alleged Randomness"

There are numerous stories, from all over the globe, of lotteries and such where the fraud seems obvious yet unprovable. Here are two such strories from 1980s. One is from New York Times. "The New Jersey Supreme Court today caught up with the Essex County Clerk and a Democrat who has conducted drawings for decades that have given Democrats the top ballot line in the county 40 times out of 41 times." The other story is from The Marker, an Israeli newspaper: Losung taxes on undocumented jobs (e.g. by plumbers), the government encouraged the public to get invoices and submit them to a lottery, but the campaign collapsed when a major winner turned out to be the tax authority director. You may be convinced that such lotteries are rigged, but how do you prove that in the court of law? Yes the probability of the outcome is negligible, but the probability of any particular outcome may be negligible. What can you say? We attempt to furnish you with a convincing argument.

Bio: Yuri Gurevich is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. He is also Prof. Emeritus at the University of Michigan, ACM Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, and Dr. Honoris Causa of a Belgian and Russian universities.