Abstract

The purpose of this note is to present a new sampling technique and to demonstrate some of its properties. The new technique consists of picking two elements at random, and deterministically generating (from them) a long sequence of pairwise independent elements. The sequence is guarantees to intersect, with high probability, any set of non-negligible density. 1. Introduction In recent years the role of randomness in computation has become more and more dominant. Randomness was used to speed up sequential computations (e.g. primality testing, testing polynomial identities etc.), but its effect on parallel and distributed computation is even more impressive. In either cases the solutions are typically presented such that they are guarateed to produce the desired result with some non-negligible probability. It is implicitly suggested that if a higher degree of confidence is required the algorithm should be run several times, each time using different coin tosses. Since the coin tosses f...

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