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Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED

12 videos recommended on HN
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3 HN users recommended this explainer3 months2022–2026 score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

It is the go-to accessible explanation of zero-knowledge proofs, linked whenever a thread needs an intuitive introduction.

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

“This is the best explanation I have seen” (HN, 2022)

2 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 3 citations · Explainers

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jimmySixDOF May 2022 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Zero knowledge proofs in RISC-V
This is the best explanation I have seen [1] : "Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert." [1] [this video]
Zero-knowledge proofs explained at five levels, child to expert.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@ricochet11 Jan 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
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agree, ZKProofs are really interesting and i'm sure they will come to be used across lots of areas of the web and not just blockchain, though their use and development is most active in the blockchain space for how useful they are for privacy+scalability. Proving knowledge without revealing information allows us to prove computations (validating them is a lot quicker than repeating the computation) and "use things" without sacrificing privacy. You can combine the two and have private transactions which are then rolled up in a computation, and then post the proof of the computation to mainnet. You get both cheap and private transactions and infra on top of the base chain. But this goes beyond blockchain: we can hand code to other people to run and then have proof they haven't altered what we agreed upon running, so we can trust the results of someone else running something. That is useful in all sorts of research for replicability in science/engineering. WIRED Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty : [this video] [link] [link] [link]
@jimmySixDOF Sep 2022 Cites it
on HN thread How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]
On YouTube (23 min) Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Using a variety of techniques, Amit breaks down what zero-knowledge proofs are and why it's so exciting in the world of cryptography. Amit Sahai, PhD, is a professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. From S1 E16 of Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED [this video]
@ghywertelling Mar 2026 Cites it
on HN thread We should revisit literate programming in the agent era
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> With agents, does it become practical to have large codebases that can be read like a narrative, whose prose is kept in sync with changes to the code by tireless machines? I think this is true. Your point supports it. If either the explanation / intention or the code changes, the other can be brought into sync. Beautiful post. I always hated the fact that research papers don't read like novels, eg "ohk, we tried this which was unsuccessful but then we found another adjacent approach and it helped." Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED [this video] Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Using a variety of techniques, Amit breaks down what zero-knowledge proofs are and why it's so exciting in the world of cryptography.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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