ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Random self-reducibility

Okay, so let's imagine that you have a big puzzle to solve, but you don't know how to solve it. It's like a really complicated maze or a giant word search with a million words.

Now, imagine that you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to solve this puzzle, because you have other things to do. So, instead of trying to solve the whole thing at once, you decide to break it down into smaller pieces.

But here's the trick: you don't just break it down into any random pieces. Instead, you randomly pick some pieces to solve, and then you use those pieces to help you solve the rest of the puzzle.

For example, let's say you randomly pick a corner of the word search to start with. You find a few words in that corner, which helps you see where some of the other words might be. Then you randomly pick another part of the puzzle to work on, and you use what you learned from the first part to help you with the second part.

This is sort of like what happens with random self-reducibility. It's a way of solving big complicated problems by breaking them down into smaller pieces and using random choices to help you solve each piece.

In computer science, random self-reducibility is a technique used to solve problems that are hard to solve or take a lot of time to solve. Instead of trying to solve the whole problem at once, the computer randomly picks some part of the problem to solve first, and then uses what it learned to help solve the rest of the problem.

It's kind of like a game of trial-and-error, where the computer keeps guessing until it finds the right answer. But even though it's random, it's still a very efficient way of solving big problems.