Computers seem methodical, deliberate, and utterly predictable. But they can also behave in completely random ways. As researchers build ever more powerful machines, a key question is: what role will randomness play?On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year's Turing Prize will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born theoretical computer mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in randomness.Often called the Nobel Prize in computing, the Turing Prize carries a prize of $1 million. The award is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped lay the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century.Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who...