Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Suppose you are trying to transmit a message.

Convert each character into bits and each bit into a signal, then send it over copper or fiber or air.

Try as you might to be as careful as possible.

What's received on the other side will not be the same as what you began with.

Noise never fails to corrupt, but a team of researchers has finally created a long-sought

locally testable code that can immediately reveal whether it's been corrupted. That's next. Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the

Simon's Foundation to enhance public understanding of science.

In the 1940s, computer scientists first confronted the unavoidable problem of noise.

Five decades later, they came up with an elegant approach to sidestepping it.

What if you could encode a message so that it would be obvious if it had been garbled before your recipient even read it. They called this property

local testability because such a message can be tested super fast in just a few spots to

ascertain its correctness. Over the next 30 years, researchers made a lot of progress

toward creating such a test, but their efforts always fell short.

Many thought local testability would never be achieved in its ideal form. Now, in a pre-print

released in November, computer scientist Erit D'Nor of the Whiteman Institute of Science, and four

mathematicians, Shai Evra, Ron Levin,

Alex Lubotsky, and Shahar Moses, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have found it.

Tom Gurr of the University of Warwick says it's one of the most remarkable phenomena that he

knows of in mathematics or computer science. He says it's the of the most remarkable phenomena that he knows of in mathematics or computer science.

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