Computers seem methodical, deliberate and utterly predictable. But they can also behave in ways that are completely random. As researchers build increasingly powerful machines, one 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 Award will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness.