Meet Celine Zhang, 18, who can prove puzzles without revealing answers

Zhang also serves as an instructor and teaching assistant at AlphaStar Academy where he teaches computer science classes and helps students with their questions. Think of a situation where you are working on a challenging puzzle when someone asks you to demonstrate that you’ve solved it, but you can’t show them your work. That sounds like near impossibility. But for 18-year-old Celine Zhang of Princeton, New Jersey, that challenge became the foundation for an innovative computer science project: building a better robot. According to a report by Society for Science, Zhang’s computer science project at the Regeneron Science Talent Search was based on a mathematical idea called zero-knowledge proofs. These are techniques that allow a person to prove to someone else that they know something without revealing the knowledge, mentions the report. Zhang realized the idea in puzzle games with a moving avatar that fuses blocks. Her method allows a player who has solved a puzzle to prove that they know the solution without just giving it away to another player. Instead of giving away the entire answer, the solver might offer some particular, but limited, guidance that lets others check off th...