Topic: Tau-Chain and Agoras Official Thread: Generalized P2P Network - page 5. (Read 309742 times)

Agoras

You can buy AGRS on Uniswap - it should have at least some liquidity:

https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=0x738865301a9b7dd80dc3666dd48cf034ec42bdda&outputCurrency=ETH

Swap pair info:
https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0xd89f1ef41a40db980883c4518387e682cdf83c7d

Karim:

On the Agoras Live side Andrei has continued to make progress towards the release of the Agoras live platform. The last feature yet to implement was a backup and restore of the users encrypted storage on the browser side. He also spent a lot of time on the testing side and we decided to bring in a full time tester to help him with those tasks. The payment Gateway is the last feature to be implemented. We are looking at wallets and onramps very heavily next week. On the interface side Mo’az continues to refine the design of the home page and browsing of the category to make discovery of channels and knowledge providers much easier. Our newest member of the team Lucca started well with Ohad assigned him a few introductory tasks like familiarising himself with the Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) a core feature of our platform. He also managed to implement a QBF solver which is a very nice achievement in itself. Luca is also participating in our discussion with our academic panel. Namely Dr Franconi and Dr. Benzmüller and this is no small achievement. Tomas has been working hard on the TML IDE. He’s fixed several bugs and made many minor improvements to the UI and added several very important features such as the ability to call out to Javascript from within TML. He also added a number of settings and made them persistent in the local browser storage and continued to that and to the regression tests for both scripts and for builtins into TML. Lots of progress on TML IDE. Team members are using it on a daily basis so it is becoming a very useful tool. Juan has been working with Ohad on migrations from Omnilayer to ERC-20 . We’ve completed some swaps this week but have run into the issue of increased Gas fees on the Ethereum Network and that’s becoming a potential problem on Agoras Live. So we are looking for alternative methods of payments such as off chain and other well known mechanisms. Importantly Juan has started work on a Second Order Logic algorithm that Ohad has just invented. Murisi has been hard at work on the TML side. Continuing with his implementations of the program transformations and optimizations of the interpreter. He put in two more optimisations such as low arity relations and removed some rules that were slow to sync. It’s starting to show some improvements in performance of TML. We also did a very lengthy code review of all the features he implemented recently with CQC and he actually managed to merge all of that code into the main branch after implementing the team's feedback. A major accomplishment. Ohad has come up with a new Second Order Logic Algorithm that he has explained to the team last week. The team has started working on it. After many lengthy discussions with our academic panel, namely, Dr Franconi. He has made significant progress on a consensus building algorithm which, as we know, is an important core feature for the Tau platform.

Prof. Franconi:

I recently joined the IDNI advisory board as an expert in computational logic. From the foundational point of view I’ve done a lot of foundational papers in computational logic applied to information system databases, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, semantic technologies, natural language semantics, natural language understanding, data integration and query answering. I also applied a lot of these techniques in industry applications. I’ve done many european projects with industries and many consultancies with various companies, small to medium, to large enterprises. It’s interesting the research I’m doing; I’m always trying to study and understand the real foundation but also to find how these foundations can be applied in real scenarios and vice versa. Trying to understand the real needs of industries and real problems of users and then try to find the logic based, foundation solutions that this problem may have without compromises. Regarding this, I have been working quite hard in this middle ground so I have to be understood and appreciated by practitioners and politicians. Typically it’s a hard job because politicians will not believe that real world problems are interesting and real world companies probably quite often, quite correctly don’t believe they need foundational solutions that they can solve by using a quick hack. IDNI in this sense is completely different. Their approach to solving this idea of the platform for communication and economy of knowledge has to be well founded to their view which I completely agree with and should be logic based in the sense that whatever kind of support decision and evolution this platform would have should be always guaranteed to be correct and satisfying truth principles. I find this idea very challenging but also quite focussed. The Team with Ohad are very “top notch”. There are software engineers, developers, logicians and the discussions I’m having with them are really interesting and they are leading us towards a definition of a better and well founded TML language. So I believe that, not only this research but the application itself will have a bright future and we will try and find it together.

Murisi:

I’ve worked on the interpreter changes which I mentioned at the end of last month. Last month I began work on a version of the entire interpreter that supports parallelisation. This month I applied the full upgrade across the board. This is quite involved and I have to make all the directives. After I update the schema for quoted programs I have to update all the directives in order to support the new schema. So that’s what I did. Now this interpreter uses lower arity relations and it was promising to be faster. Another thing I did was change the design of the interpreter. Before it was using slow synchronisation rules. To make it faster I implemented a fixed point check inside the interpreter. On the interpreter front we’ve had a little bit of faster performance. Another thing I have worked on this month is applying program transformations to quarter programs so this was done successfully although right now there haven't been any speed improvements. I’ve also worked on investigation of other semantics for interpreting TMl which may be a little bit more user friendly but yet equivalent to the partial fixed point semantics that we currently have. This investigation stemmed from my work with the interpreter. A minor investigation was made whether we can use the domain over which pfp works so the interpreter uses certain rules which cause relations to alternate and I realised that if we were to use f4pfp or another variation we’d be able to also get the program to reach a fixed point. This is an alternative to other things we are considering as well. Other things I’ve been working on include, general testing, documentation, bug fixing and reviews of the code. To that end I’ve had a look at the proofs for the conjunctive query algorithm to see if maybe there was a way to shortcut certain operations within the algorithm and so obtain faster performance. That has led me to some articles where they’ve got faster conjunctive query algorithms. I’ll be looking into those over the next month and hope to start working with binary decision diagrams and the BDD solver for TML engine.

Tomas:

This month I was working on the online TML editor. I fixed unicode in relation names in templar view and many more small ui problems. I made scroll bars smaller and moved widgets to different places so it’s more compact now. I have fixed the editor experience on smartphones. New features include more settings which are stored in browsers local storage. There is now the ability to open multiple files at the same time. I’ve also worked on built-ins for TML and getting more familiar with the current implementation. I”ve added some regression tests and head built-ins as a fact so that works now. I’ve Improved printing built-ins and javascript eval which runs in the browser. I’ve worked on some caching of built-in calls so the call is remembered and not repeated each step. There is also a keyboard modifier which you can use which allows you to manage caching so you can make the call repeatedly.

Lucca:

I had the pleasure to implement the QBF solver and i did that by working through an introductory tutorial on BDD’s by a professor called Anderson and this basically introduces, in the core sense, more or less efficient implementation of BDD’s and then with some improvements I worked out an implementation of a QBF solver based on that. Then I went over this implementation with Ohad and we optimised it further. In the end there were results visible to reducing runtime from five minutes to 47seconds so that was quite a pleasure to see the improvement to optimised code. I’ve spent time on studying C++ and database theory in order to really grasp the theory behind TML.

Mo’az:

I’ve been working on the design flows of agoras live version one and version two and we finished the design of the home page whilst adding live sessions. Last week we have been working on how we can display categories and how the user can navigate the Agoras Live platform. I’ve also been working on despacting all the mobile views of the missing screens and making some flows about how the user can deposit, withdraw or buy Agoras through the platform.

Andrei:

I’ve been mostly testing the Agoras Live platform. I’ve covered every aspect of the platform which some outstanding work left on the mobile view side of the platform. Everything else is pretty much working. I had to refactor the code of Agoras live front end because currently we are looking for a front end developer to implement more features for agoras live and move to Mo’az’s created design with some additional features . We are ready to pass the platform to a professional tester to help me to find any outstanding issues I was unable to locate. I’ve also implemented the feature of restoring and backing encrypted user storage. See here:

[ https://youtu.be/y65mThoZpxg?t=1268 ]

Kilian:

This month I’ve been working on aggregating crypto focused youtubers but so far the offers we’ve received were highly overpriced so we still need to find the right youtubers to work with. Ideally we are looking to onboard three to five youtubers for long term partnerships. So if you have your favourite youtuber we are definitely open for recommendations. Together with the team we’ve been on various marketing agency calls looking to find the right partner for our marketing activities in the future and we’ve come to a conclusion with a partner and hopefully very soon you’ll feel the impact of that partnership. Fola and I have been on many calls with designers trying to find the world's best designers to collaborate with to do the website and rebranding. We are still in the process of doing that and hope to make a decision soon. We’ve been looking alot for copywriters which relates to the marketing front. Ideally we would have an inhouse copywriter to communicate the project to the public. I’ve started fine tuning the presentation and started work on an explainer video. I’ve done a lot of community support related to the ERC-20 swap. It’s an ongoing swap where users over whitebit can convert their omni based agoras to ERC-20 agoras. It is an automatic swap so you just deposit your omni based tokens agoras. Once deposited it automatically converts to ERC-20 agoras and you can only withdraw them as such. Community support includes the listing we announced on Bittrex where users who previously held Agoras on the bittrex exchange will get their Agoras balances restored including US citizens. US users will be able to withdraw but not trade due to regulatory reasons. We’ve also announced the launch of the Tau Supporter Program to be launched on March 15th. We’ve allocated 200,000 Agoras over a three month period where you can basically accumulate points by completing challenges and thereby climbing up the leaderboard and earning your share of the leaderboard.Apply here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSevbdnhGNN3gBXoc38QoerYpWvjA8VAPUXmDDeNzquySqHjhw/viewform

Tau Supporter Program Info:

https://www.tauchainfans.com/Blog/General/Announcement-Launch-of-the-Tauchain-Supporter-Program/104

The community member of the month is “Miao Miao” for his long term support of the project and his active participation on telegram this month so, Thank you!

Juan:

We are looking to wrap up the micropayment channel or the off chain payments with our ethereum / ERC-20 in order to support Agoras Live payments. That is in an advanced stage. We already have an off chain payment micropayment channel working on ethereum but we are dealing right now with impractical high gas fees making Agoras Live’s use case not very compatible with this current setup so we have launched development to the agoras live payments through the Binance Smart Chain where all the code we have put together for Ethereum is fully compatible. We still need to figure out several infrastructural and integration tweaks to make it functional. So we are decreasing the fees from $20-$40 over Ethereum to 20-40 cents on Binance Smart Chain. Next month I hope to start on TML’s Second Order Logic support based on Ohad’s Algorithm.

Fola: I’ve been involved in the hiring discussions that have happened so far this month. Web apps developer, front end developer, a blockchain developer, a copywriter and we’ve also settled on a marketing firm we’re talking to now. There is alot going on at IDNI now and we hope to settle on a Graphic Designer soon and finish off the website. Bitrex have swapped the Omni tokens to ERC-20 Tokens and we hope to have a listing date from them soon. Please don’t send any of the omni tokens to them just yet. We are currently negotiating how to do an ongoing swap with them. Once I get more details we’ll update the article. We are also working on the UKex Swap and we hope to have that finished pretty soon, wrapped up next week including a listing date.

Ohad:

I have been working on the swap to Bittrex and getting back there was a long waiting goal that Fola set to achieve and he has achieved it successfully. I have worked on algorithms for Second Order Logic which can serve as an initial algorithm. Finally we will have some solver of Second Order Logic. It has a lot of room for improvement which is very good news. It has the potential to improve. There are already some ways we can see to improve it so it will improve with time. With the discussions with the academic panel we have discussed lifting the opinion map to have a more fundamental role in the system and by that bypass a certain logical difficulty in setting of laws of changing the laws and so on. I was also thinking about more ideas of how to optimise TML speed. Not only faster, but faster sooner. Once way to go is to support more back end so right we have the ability back end that we implemented. But perhaps we can allow the user to choose other backends like Souffle or SQLite, etc. And by that on certain tasks that BDD’s are not good at, at least not yet, opermising BDD’s is an ongoing task which contains many non trivial tasks. Maybe we will be able to by allowing other existing backends to have TML faster, namely sooner, and it will hopefully release the bottleneck of TML not being fast enough which stops us from achieving certain goals. I have also been thinking about how to start working on mainnet. How to have a blockchain implemented in TML. We will hire personnel for this matter. There is a lot to decide there but the process has been started

Q&A:

Q: Lucca? What ideas are you working on that you think could improve Tau and or Agoras. What do you hope to achieve?

Lucca: The long term goal is to work on model finding for second order logic formulas or even higher order formulas. This is particularly important for Tau because the later vision is to just write a specification of something, of what the program should do, and then you want to extract from these specifications, a program. This is nothing else than model finding in a higher order domain and because a program that is formed from specification can be seen as a model for these specifications so to speak. This is one point let’s say, a necessity for the Tau environment to have a higher dimensional model finding. Another thing is that with higher dimension model finding you can create databases to queries that are higher dimensional in a logical sense that use higher order quantifiers. So as mentioned, Ohad came up with an algorithm that does the job for Second Order Logic so one of the questions is can we do it more efficiently. Are there other ways over the next few months. Let’s see how these thoughts evolve. I will dive into the theory and possibly make this even better. I also come from the background of algorithmic model theory and one of the tasks is to find a model for a given formula or a set of formulas and that these are higher order logic formulas, you want to be able to generate a model automatically. Let's say I want a group that has order 20, for example. Current model finding technology is not able to generate this. This is not specifically written for groups but it in the general sense so one of the goals to also examine if we can push in a competitive setting model finding to a new level.

Q: When will the token swap be available for token holders in the United States?

Fola: Bittrex have swapped the Omni tokens for ERC-20 tokens You can’t trade however due to regulatory reasons as a US citizen but you can withdraw. We don’t know when it is coming for other US token holders. The best we can do is work on it.

Q: Since performance and scaling are going to be a challenge for Tau and Agoras, what are some ideas you have for improving performance and how much performance is enough to be useful ?

Ohad: We have a long list of optimisations for the BDD layer and most, if not all, of those optimisations are non trivial otherwise we’d do it beforehand and that’s an ongoing effort. We can also support backends for TML not only for BDDs and by that release the performance bottlenecks and release sooner. How do we know if it’s fast enough. Well it should be fast enough to fulfill its goals in a reasonable time. It’s goal is to serve as a language translator so it needs to be able to translate documents in some time reasonable to the user. For now it can’t pass itself in a reasonable time. When we see progress on this front we can say that TML is fast enough to continue working with it.

Q: How will IP (intellectual property) be handled over something like Agoras? e.g. will Agoras rank who contributed the knowledge first and reward accordingly to this, or are there some better ideas?

Ohad: This is up to the users and I don’t mean in the sense that the user defines the system. I mean whether to trust a certain knowledge provider is up to you just like in everyday life. Tau cannot say who is right and who is wrong, who has good na who has bad knowledge. It is up to the users by traditional means.

Q: Will Agoras Live be ported to TML? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?

Ohad: It will be ported to TML in the future. It will use the smart contract mechanism that comes with Tau. I don’t see any apparent disadvantage. Advantages, the ability to have formalised contracts mainly and also the fact that it is controlled by its users so they can control how the platform behaves.

Q: In layman terms, what does “size of universe” mean in the tau context, and what is its relevance?

Ohad: The universe in logical terms. Another name of it is Logical discourse. It is basically the vocabulary that the TML program works on and if you have a certain size of vocabulary it is related to the number of bits you need to encode each term in vocabulary. The number of bits is then reflected in the binary decision diagrams. The higher the number of bits the exponentially larger potentially the BDDs can get. Therefore it is very important to maintain the smallest number of bits as possible. Also from complexity theory considerations, the time it takes for a TML program to run is as a function of the size of the universe so it is yet another reason why we need to be very strict about it’s size

Q: In what cases will computation be done directly in the Tau runtime? In what cases will computation be done in other binaries synthesised and compiled by Tau? WIll it make sense to synthesise and compile just in time binaries per purpose? Is this how tauchain will update blockchain node binaries?

Ohad: It makes sense to compile code to binaries. From the point of view of the network it doesn’t matter how a node reaches a computed whatever it wants to send over the network. It doesn’t matter whether it uses methods of interpretation or compilation but the code of Tau itself itself to be distributed over the network should not be distributed as binaries. It should be distributed as logical formulas that users can reason over. That's the main advantage of the Tau technology.

Q: What will be the first languages defined for Tau?

Fola: The first language over Tau will be TML and it’s entirely up to the users to write the translators to other languages for other users to begin to use those languages.

Ohad: It is first a foremost for knowledge representation languages. TML is a logical language but it is not suitable for knowledge representation so the intention is to write translators for knowledge representation languages that admit the logical requirements of Tau using TML

Q: Languages have different scopes and expressibility. How can they be translated, or can they? For example, can controlled English be translated to Python? C++ to Rust? Is this problem for Tau or only a problem for humans?

Ohad: Yes it is a problem for Humans. Humans will have to define the translation process. Tau can not just look at a language and guess how to translate.

Q: What do you see as the progression of use-cases as Tay Matures? E.g. Will the first application of tay be to optimise tau. Then to define a language, then to synthesize other programs? Or define C++, define controlled english, discuss Tau and bootstrap tauchain? Or is it still unclear and too early to tell?Ohad: the progression of the use cases will be to have large scale discussions in general. Them, In particular, what Tau’s next version should be like. Then the system will automatically update itself as well as the economics of knowledge. The ability to trade knowledge.

Q: Does the team foresee Tau-specific hardware for faster and or embedded processing?

Ohad: Not for now but maybe we will see in the future.Q: If agoras Live is being built on top of mainnet, being the first application using Tauchain, will its release need to be postponed until the mainnet is ready?

Ohad: No we don’t postpone the release of Agoras Live as it is developed separately to mainnet and we don’t build it on TML. In future we will integrate it into the whole Tau technology,

Q: What kind of improvements or new features can we expect if Agoras Live is built on top of the mainnet instead of being an independent application?

Ohad: Users will be able to control how the program behaves and change it. They will have the ability to have richer contracts and contracts that can be reasoned over.

Q: What is the fundamental reason we still craft code by hand and not by program synthesis? Does tau solve those fundamental problems?

Ohad: The main reason is lack of tools and lack of good tools especially from a performance point of view and yes this is a major problem that Tau intends to solve.

WOOOOOHOOOOL (:

AGRS can now be traded via Uniswap:
https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=0x738865301a9b7dd80dc3666dd48cf034ec42bdda&outputCurrency=ETH

Swap pair info:
https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0xd89f1ef41a40db980883c4518387e682cdf83c7d

true. i guess that might change when some more buzz is made about tau and agoras.

i tried trading on whitebit and must say, after some trouble - that i caused all by myself-  I'm satisfied with most of it, especially the support. the liquidity is rising there for agrs at the moment.

my selfmade trouble: to play aroung with the saving plans and forget that and wonder one day after it where your money is. problem was, that the balance doesn't show up at the overview, so if you stack e.g. btc in a saving plan, it will just dissapear from the account balance overview. i sent a support ticket because i thought my money is gone and the whitebit team reacted in less than 1h (might be even like 20min and tried hard to solve my problem. I sent screenshots they asked for, they asked for more and at the end one day later (and maybe 5 mails n both directions) they asked if i maybe started a saving plan. i must say the support was way more than i hoped for.

but: a big problem is that they want 30 agrs for withdrawel, which is crazy, atm thats more than 15$. i think maybe it's a charge that is leftover from omni/btc. i sent a support ticket and they told me they will consider my request for cheaper withdrawel. no idea if they will change that, though, but 15$ for erc-20 is way to much I feel.

so be advised not to sent a few agrs to be swapped and draw them out afterwards, there will be nothing left 

there are no liquidity on any decetralized exchanges now.

Karim:
We are very excited to welcome new team member, Luca. who is a student of mathematics with Prof. Benzmüller. You’ll see his background is very impressive. This month we continued work on the core TML product and the Agoras Live product which is being rebranded as we all know. On the TMlL side Murisi kept working on the performance of the eval predicate and is running benchmarks on eval and has prototyped a program transformation / optimisation that will help with running eval. It also helps with CQC optimisations and he is also working on a parallel version. Lots of focus going on making eval faster. Juan continued his work on ERC-20 token with the help of Ohad and Fola for the transition to ERC-20. WOrking with the exchange that will first list us. Working on some tools for that. He has also been working on the payment system for Agoras live. Switching it from the Omni layer to ERC-20 layer so trying to replicate the feature of micro payments we had with Omni layer. THomas continued his work on both TML and the TML IDE [ https://tml.idni.org ]. On the TML side he finished the transformation of nested programs into one merged program and he added flow control, just like any other language IF, THEN, ELSE and WHY statements. He also on the IDE side made the executions of TML run in the background thread so that they don’t block the UI thread. He converted the IDE page to a progressive webapp to give it a more native app feel. He is also working on the documentation for TML and reworking the introduction to TML. All in preparation for a !.0 Release of TML hopefully for Q1 of this year. On the Agoras Live side Andrei is doing thorough testing and fixing minor issues as he goes and other optimisations. He also implemented the feature called “recurring group calls” for future utilisation. We are redesigning the discovery algorithms for students and teachers to find one another. Mo’az is still refining as part of the rebranding effort for agoras live.We transitioned from using tools called sketch and zeppelin to using one tool called figma which integrates the functionality of both. He has redesigned the front page and redesigned smaller pages to accompany it. Andrei is still implementing new designs. We are meeting on a regular basis to push the launch Agoras live as soon as possible.

Lucca:
I'm very happy to join the project this week. I’ve been in talks with Ohad regarding Prof. Benzmüller. I’ve joined to work on the second order quantifier boolean side of the TML language THe logical foundations of TML in the higher order domain. Regarding my background, I'm doing my masters at the moment. I’ve done a bachelor thesis together with prof Benzmüller and dana scott who is a famous logician from the US and publishing a thesis with great success. Besides this I’ve been working on VR development during the past 2 years. I’m looking forward to getting involved further with my mathematical skills.
 
Murisi:
Last month I’ve been working on performance and the general direction of these improvements has been reduced in table sizes as I noticed that large tables sizes were causing a little bit of a slow down in interpretation of quoted programs so I continued my work on finding ways to avoid computations and a way of storing results in tables. I’ve also been working on a different algorithm for domain generation. Before I was generating domains for quoted programs by just enumerating each element of the domain but now I’m using mathematical formulas in order to generate domains. This uses modular arithmetic remainder and quotients in order to include lists in numbers. I’ve also worked on binary body transformation which essentially converts old TML rules into rules that only have one conjunct. So if a rule has five conjuncts before it is reduced into multiple rules with the single conjunct. THis has been done before but my work has been to generalise that in order to support tml rules with negation which is more complicated. We are still prototyping the functionality and we hope to find a faster way of faster transformations than the one we currently have now. I was benchmarking performance, looking at the intersection of secrecy conjunctive query containment and CQNC which is containment of negation. I was looking at the effects of those optimations in eval and trying to see if one could help the other. The results haven't been so good but I hope to find ways in order to make CQC more applicable to eval in the coming months. ANother line of investigation has been the parellisation of eval. We know that TML programs when they are encoded in a certain format are parellelisable and can be run on multiple cores so I was looking at alternative implementations of eval which are in a format which support this kind of parellisation. I’ve also been playing around a bit with the passive  generator and seeing how we can improve its performance. With eval there's been a lot of improvements in the speed over the past month by over 10x or 20x. I hope to continue this progress in the performance.

Tomas:
I have finished the transformation of nested programs including conditional statements IF and WHILE. There is more information and examples in the readme of the TML repository and also you can try this transformation and conditional programs online [ https://tml.idni.org ]. I’ve moved the TML execution into a web working so it doesn’t block the main thread with the UI when running TML programs. I’ve fixed the UI errors and made TML execution more stable. I’ve converted the page into progressive web app so it can work offline and installable on some devices. Now I'm working on the updated introduction to TML which will replace the old intro and I’ve started to examine options to store files right in the browser or elsewhere in the cloud.
 
Mo’az:
This month we decided to use figma for all our design work enabling designers to work with developers in a more streamlined manner. I’ve moved the first iteration of Agoras Live and the design system to the Figma platform. We’ve made some revisions to the design of the front page, how we display profiles and some additional features. I’m implementing the team's feedback and doing further research on user behavior which will shape further design improvements.
 
Andrei:
I’ve been fixing small issues on Agoras live, making sure everything is working before handing over to a professional tester. I’ve added image compression. [ https://youtu.be/2g67sVlxzSg?t=950 ]. I’ve moved to the current design however the priority currently is to have everything working. Every teacher can now set their status to busy and/or create a public lecture for everyone to join for a payment or for free. When you select a public lecture you want to set it to everyday or every week and duration.
I have a list of fixes and tasks here and I am somewhere in the middle and of course I’m trying to move as fast as I can.
 
Kilian:
I’ve been continuing my work on the Tau presentation. We are approaching the final version so mostly fine tuning rather than changing the narrative. It’s mostly text driven now as previously it was image driven. We redefined the tau supporter program and is close to being launched. WE have recorded an explainer video. Once it is edited and updated we want to roll out the supporter program. Fola and I have done some research on companies that provide fiat onramp for crypto, in our case agoras. We’ve settled on a good solution being the company https://transak.com who connects to uniswap. This is to be implemented on Agoras Live so users can use their credit or debit card to purchase Agoras. I’ve curated a list of crypto focused youtubers and started outreach towards them. Requested either a review of the project or an interview where we are able to explain the project in more detail. I’ve experimented with 4chan. Besides this I have been doing community support. This month the community member of the month is Felix for contributing a lot to discussions on telegram!  
 
Juan:
My work this month has been focused on the payment channel system for agoras live but now based on the ethereum blockchain. Submitting payment is in a peer to peer manner supported by the Agoras token so this is in the early prototype stage but already working locally. I’m looking forward to wrapping up, possibly during february, and implementing the payment system in the Agoras live platform. Then getting back to TML development in the short term.      
 
Fola: I’ve been working on the token swap to ERC-20. Despite our efforts the exchanges do the swap on the same day The exchanges we are working with will be doing the swap across different days. The date of the swap will likely be next week or the following week. Beyond that we are working on marketing. I’ve approached crypto and more traditional marketing companies to assist us in this push, alongside the launch of agoras live, the swap and TML. All the great things we’ll be doing over the next couple of months. We are speaking with designers now regarding the rebrand and are close on the decision to rebrand to the new name of Agoras Live. We will push the name out soon. It’s very close.
 
Ohad:
I’ve been involved with matters relating to the upcoming new exchange listing and Agoras swap to ERC-20. I’ve continued discussions with Prof. Benzmüller about knowledge representation languages that are suitable for Tau. It is a very long and deep discussion which is ongoing. There are many considerations which don’t typically arise in other systems because of the complexity of the laws of changing the laws and of course the decidability issues. On the front of Second Order Logic, I have discovered some new methods that are related to permutation elimination. The ability to eliminate muted arguments in relations as well as taking some ideas from SMT solvers. In particular, Acumen encoding. Which brings me to think the solution for Second Order Logic which has taken about a year in research, is close. I think relatively soon we will have some initial solution on the table.
 
 
Q&A:

Q: Will we be able to use TML in vscode/eclipse/jupyter or will we have to wait for a dedicated environment?
Tomas: You can write TML code in any editor. It’s just a text file. So far there is no special network for TML in those name editors but it can certainly be added.

Q: How has TML been developed so far? Is it “production ready” at every step of the way, or is “quality” only to be added at the end?
Karim: So TML is essentially a runtime environment for the language. You can think of it as a compiler. Our approach essentially is that we only implement a feature if we are 100% sure we have a mathematically correct algorithm to do it. We call that correct by design philosophy to development and as such it’s not an application where it has a lot of dangling features that need to be taken care of. It’s much more amenable to regression testing also. We do a lot of that so the answer to your question is that for sure the quality is built into the product from the beginning feature by feature and we’re certainly not waiting until the end to fix all the bugs. That’s not to say bugs can’t happen. There have been bugs and they have been fixed.

Q: Ohad is BTC and Agoras your only crypto holdings?
Ohad: I’m not a crypto investor at all in fact I’m not interested. I don’t follow markets, I don’t have time so I’m just not into it.

Q: How will “risk free” interest without inflation work. WIll all locked Agoras get a slice of the hedging action on the network, weighted according to how long it's locked?
Ohad: The mechanism of interest relies on the derivatives market that we’ll develop over agoras. A curtain combination of derivatives can give risk free interest as was shown long ago by Black and Scholes themselves. It’s not so simple to explain but I warm refer you to the part of the whitepaper that explains this - [ https://www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf -  Derivatives and risk free interest p.38 ]

Q: Will the Agoras tokens be necessary to maintain the security of the network through the execution of validators in a system like proof of stake?
Kilian: Whether or not Agoras or Tau will end up running over proof of stake will be decided on by the users. The consensus can change over time according to whatever the users desire it to be. It’s not fixed yet. It will be decided on user consensus when Tau is launched.

Q: Tau pretends to be a decentralised intelligent blockchain that updates itself and learns from humans, that is, a cybernetic intelligent agent like the one featured in the movie “transcendent”. Is this correct?
Kilian: It’s definitely correct that Tau is able to update itself and learns from humans through our communication paradigm we have developed. “Human - Machine - Human communication”. Users talk to the machine in formal languages so the machine can understand what the users have to say. So over time the machine aggregates a knowledge base consisting of all the formalised knowledge that has been aggregated over the system. The machine can then, for example, engage in discussions for you and comment upon  matters or discussions without you having to be there. You can see Tau as a system that over time becomes more intelligent as more knowledge is being formalised over the network.


Q: Will developers be able to use Tau for their decentralised application and teach it tasks to make it smarter for various different purposes?
Ohad: Yes, Tau presents, not only a paradigm for collaborative decision making but also for collaborative software development. First and foremost, developing itself but also other applications. This development paradigm is knowledge oriented and consensus oriented. Knowledge oriented in the sense that people simply add more and more opinions to the system and what the software should do emerges from what is implied from the knowledge that people formalise. Consensus orientated takes the part that everyone agrees on and that becomes the software. So, yes, people can develop new software over Tau which gets smarter with time because people add more and more knowledge and the software changes accordingly.

Q: Since Ethereum is the global network par excellence for smart contracts and dapps due to the network effect. As the first project of this type, could Tau be the global artificial intelligence network on which all new consulting infrastructure is developed?
Kilian: Yes, definitely, as we have discussed before as more knowledge is being aggregated over the platform that knowledge can be used by companies, by individuals, to consult other projects or participate in discussions with that knowledge. The network, on its own, can participate in discussions and consult companies on very specific matters.

Karim:
Despite the delay in the Agoras.Live release I still think we ended up the year on a very strong note boht on TML and Agoras.Live side. Regarding TML, Murisi has continued his excellent work on the eval operator. He re-implemented it and improved functionality of the operator by allowing for larger program size as well as the much improved performance. The Eval Operator continues to be a very hot topic of discussion between ohad and the academic panel. On the syntax/language side, Umar continued his work on the parsing and the conversion to universe of size. An Important optimization for increasing the speed of TML programs. He Also added complex type specifications which are compound data types which are similar to C / C++ data types. He also fixed some bugs in the TMl parsing. Juan transitioned from working on TML for the last couple of months to working on a new high priority project in the month of December. The transition from the Omi layer to the ERC-20 Ethereum Platform. We have a candidate for the smart contract that will be necessary for the ERC-20 token. Ohad and Juan are currently testing it on the Ethereum testnet. On the TML editor side, Thomas continued his great work on that. He implemented the front end using the stencil JS tool which allowed him to implement syntax highlighting for TML and he fixed some bugs related to the syntax highlighting with respect to unicode, He also fixed a hard long standing TML bug relating to duplicate rules. On the Agoras.Live side there are 2 main reasons for the delayed release. First, we had to move to jitsi open source video platform to Big Blue Button for better reliability. Andrei had to re-implement the payment system for that. It was a lot of work and we continue to test with Big Blue Button. The other difficult task is the payment layer. We have transitioned from Omni to ERC-20. THe second reason for delay is due to rebranding. There is another platform with the name Agora. Being a video platform as well there is too much of a close call there so we are having to rebrand Agoras.Live. We are still working on the name. We are looking at February for a Beta release with potential main release in the May timeframe.
 
Umar:
One of the challenges we’ve had is how to specify the sizes of integers and factors that we have in TML. Previously, it was all fixed and static. However, depending on the domain and the model that should vary One of the solutions was to use types to specify what type of object a certain variable is referring to so we introduced integer corrector and symbol types so now you can define them for the predicates. THe other important thing was if you want to define complex types like structures. You can now group these primitive types to a complex type structure similar to C / C++. You can also map the variables against these complex types and you can parse them. This should be specifiable and the TML parser should be able to parse these types. We have built the first version of that. It can be used to convert the raw program into a size two universe program. We call it a bit program because we have exactly a bit specified for every variable constant and symbol. Currently the conversion from raw conversion to bit program is completed. The next step will be to take the bit program and map it into the underlying abilities and rules. That’s more challenging because the architecture is more complex and we have to cross and cut through lots of things to make that happen. I added some tests. Both of these changes have been checked in. I look for feedback from peers on how to further improve it.
 
 
Murisi:
Last month I was mostly working on Eval and some of the things I have done include a complete redesign of eval in order to circumvent certain requirements on the sizes of interpreters. SPecifically before you could only nest smaller interpreters inside large interpreters but now that is no longer a restriction. THe trick I used in order to achieve this was to use Linked lists in order to represent data in the interpreter. ANother thing that I have done is implement the eval operator and I have started optimising it in order to get practicable speeds. RIght now eval is currently only working on smaller programs. The reason being one of it’s bottlenecks is generating a large number of facts in order to interpret quoted programs. I have started doing a form of on demand evaluation in order to choose specifically between facts i want to derive and not derive every fact. Sometimes every fact is used later on by the program. I have also been researching extensions to eval. One in particular was self modifying programs and this would work by allowing a quoted program to modify the quotation that contains it and if a quoted program is able to this would cause eval ro start  interpreting a different program, This is how self modification will be achieved. This may be useful as a mechanism for changing laws. The last thing I have been doing throughout has been identifying bugs and fixing them.


Tomas:
In december after several days of debugging I found a bug in TML. I’ve done some work on transformation of nested programs into a single nested program. It already works for programs without conditional statements like IF and WHILE. Regarding the online TML editor, I revised the front end parts and I fixed most of the issues including syntax highlighting of source files containing unicode. UI updates problems, and syntax highlighting for new TML features. I will be making further fixes and improvements to the UI.  
 

Kilian:
I’ve been working on several things this month. A tau community handbook which will serve as a comprehensive guide about everything that could be of interest to existing and new community members. The goal is that when someone looks into the Tau community handbook  they will get an understanding about tau, how to contribute and how to get rewarded for the contributions. I've also worked on the nearly finished Tau supporter program and hope to be able to launch it this month. THe goal of which will be to have the option to complete challenges and based on the traction you generate you will be rewarded in agoras. A great way to drive new attention to Tau. I have been working on the pitch presentation for the project. WE have several narratives. We are drawing closer to finalising the presentation and to turn it into an animated video. This month we were able to announce the two new advisors. Prof. Franconi (https://inf.unibz.it/~franconi/) joins @TauChainOrg as advisor in knowledge reasoning and representation. His research relates to #Database, #ArtificialIntelligence & #semantic tech. Prof. Benzmüller, whose research includes areas of #AI, #philosophy, #mathematics, #computerscience and #naturallanguage, will be joining @TauChainOrg, firstly to solve second order logic. We have also onboarded a 3rd advisor. His research focuses on combining the methods from formal argumentation theory, natural language semantics, epistemic and philosophical logic to formally model the mathematical philosophical  logical and reasoning of humans. We’ve been speaking with potential partners for integration fiat to crypto gateways into agoras live. We still haven't found the ideal partner so if you have any recommendations please pass them onto us. The whitebit AMA has gone up onto tauchainfans.com. I plan to publish more community oriented content on there so check out tauchainfans.com for updates. The community member for this month is @Jordiles for constantly liking and retweeting our twitter posts.
 
 
Mo’az:
This month I have been polishing multiple parts of the Agoras.LIve site, We were working on polishing the home page in particular how we can display the knowledge providers there. We have settled on one of my iterations. Another thing I’ve worked on is the profile, how we can solve the issue of a single user can be expert in multiple areas of expertise, video uploads and an area where the user can introduce themselves properly. We’ve polished the search on both mobile and desktop. We’ve also been working on the feed where the user can ask multiple knowledge providers for help on a specific task at the same time.
 

Andrei:
Last month and christmas holidays I’ve been working on implementing the payment system into the video communication platform. It was a very hard task but I needed to be sure everything was properly encrypted on the user side as much as possible. Let me demonstrate how it works. [https://youtu.be/9-xYdKTiOHs?t=1314] Let schedule a call with albert einstein for 60mins for today. You can see it now has a proposed meeting and notification that there is a new appointment. We will accept it and go back to our user profile. The meeting is now. We encrypt storage in order to verify our payment and then we get to the platform. This is Albert Einstein's wallet on exchange. The call has been confirmed and we can make the call. It will cost 1020 agoras for one hour but for this purpose I have set it to 1 agoras just to demonstrate. We want to pay so we encrypt our storage in order to create the payment code from the exchange. SO we got this code. It is encoded with Albert's public key. With that encrypted key we can proceed with the call. IF the payment fails the payment will show as unpaid. Albert can discuss with students and/or ban them from the meeting. IF we check the balance on exchange we can see it has come through. So we got our payment for the class and we can proceed.
Now we will make a list of what shall work on what should work on the agoras platform and test the site with the team. We will then have a closed beta and work with Mo’az to further polish. We will invite the community for a round of testing. Then it will be publicly released to everyone.
 
Juan:
My work this month was around the eth infrastructure and the implementations of a ERC-20 token for the new version of the Agoras token. We’ve put a lot of attention into the security concerns with ERC tokens. We set up some code and scripts to interact with Ethereum in a convenient way for our requirements. I’ve been analysing feasible implementation for multi sig wallets and the off chain payment system is required to run agoras live. Shifting from Omni layer to Etherium and concentrating on the feasible security flaws of the Ethereum structure.  
 
Fola: I’ve been speaking with BCEX and UCEX regarding the questions about withdrawals within the community. I await their response. We have signed a contract to list our ERC-20 token at UCEX once it is ready. We have on boarded a new team member, He is a student of Prof. Benzmüller and he is going to be helping on the developer side of things. We’ve been working on Fiat onramps and hope to have that feature to buy agoras using credit/debit card. Rebranding we are naming agoras. The agoras token will stay as Agoras but the agoras live platform will be renamed. It could be renamed Tau but we don’t know currently. We are working with lawyers to make sure people’s data input on site is held in regards to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) We don’t want to hold any user data and want to make sure the platform goes out inline with GDPR guidance we have to abide by.  In Addition to the UCEX exchange we have a new exchange we have signed to with the token trading pairs ARGS/USDT and AGRS/BTC. The announcement of which will be coming soon Once the ERC-20 token is ready.
 
Ohad:
I have been working with Juan to create the ERC-20 token. WE’ve been doing some testing on the testnet and I guess it will be finished in a few days. AS fola says New exchanges are coming, WE can’t say their names now but I’m pretty sure it will make the community very happy. I’m also working on the explanation materials we have for Tau and Agoras. They are exciting ideas. They just need the right words to explain them. I have been studying finite fields and in general fields of characteristics too which can be seen as an aspect of boolean algebras that apparently is unstudied and should be very fruitful for all kinds of logic including second order logic. I’ve also had a lot of discussion with Prof. Franconi about everything but in particular about self interpretation aspects of TML and the languages for law in general.


 
Q&A:

Q: Are the team full time employees or part time contractors?

Fola: All of us are full time. The exceptions being we do have some part time team members joining that will be Lucca who is a student of Prof. Benzmüller, and the university advisors that have joined the team on our advisory board also work part time. Our hearts are in this project fully so we are all in, all of the time!


Q: For five years now, little to no effort has been put into Agoras or Tau being known or participating in the cryptocurrency scene. I see many community members being fed by this. A negative sentiment can obstruct the building of participation that's needed for feeding an eventual TML base. How are you planning to fix this?

Ohad: Indeed in most of those years, there was less effort. I was virtually alone and couldn’t handle everything but now things are completely different. We have the whole team including Fola and Kilian working on forming a massive outreach. I’m sure you will feel it quite soon.


Q: Is Ohad working on this project full time?

Ohad: Yes, definitely. This project is the most important thing for me but also because of the promise I gave the community. Beyond this I see Tau as really the most important in the world and I see people who really get to understand Tau to agree with me on this. So, I definitely don’t work anywhere else. This is the most important thing for me.


Q: A small amount of agoras is held for Ohad and the team. How long can this project live with the money available?

Ohad: The small amount you refer to is the amount we will keep once the full products are ready. We do have a large amount of agoras that until then we intend to sell further in a good point in the future once the project has gained traction and so on.


Q: Is the team running to a budget, including allocation of money for marketing. etc ?

Ohad: Yes definitely, we have a budget for marketing and paying the team and finishing all of our promises. Definitely.


Q: Coingecko and I’m sure others have pages that link to news of crypto. Can we start to upload our news to these sites?

Kilian: We will check with coingecko to see if the option to do is free or paid. For paid options it would make sense to upload our video and pitch presentation once it’s ready. We can distribute the video across all platforms. For free options we can definitely sharing our monthly updates. A good idea, I’ll create a list of the places we can do so.


Q: Throughout our time of development, have we seen much outside interest from other blockchain projects?

Kilian: We haven’t really seen interest from other blockchain projects but I believe that has to do with us not having a released product yet. Once TML is released I imagine that will spark external interest from other projects.


Q: What event do you think is necessary to increase the price of agoras. Adding team members  surely doesn’t affect the price. Can we expect a rise in the price before agoras live is released?

Ohad: Of course we cannot specifically say anything about the rise of price. We are actively working on releasing materials that explain the project. Once one understands what the project is about then there are very few questions about it’s value. We also prepare materials for outreach to bigger audiences outside the crypto scene for example the release of TML. Of course we actively work on listing on big and reputable exchanges.


Q: What are your realistic expectations on when Agoras live will be released?

Andrei: We plan to release a closed beta in February and after that we will release it when we are happy with the quality of the service it offers 2-3moths to implement everything after the public testing. Perhaps May? However, with software development it’s difficult to predict.


Q: Now that agoras live has been delayed should we lower our expectations of being listed on a US exchange in Q1 2021?

Fola: We didn’t and don’t have plans to get listed on US exchanges in 2021. However, it is one of our goals and main efforts. WE have a few hoops to jump through that relate to the release of the token and the platform development itself. We do have a non US exchange announcement coming we believe you will be happy with. We continue to work on getting better exchanges for your guys to trade on.


Q: How do you envision the coming months regarding the visibility of the project to the cryptosphere. Do you have any plans to make people interested in us ?

Kilian: Yes, specifically the tau supporter program to drive attention to the project. We will reward community members on the traction/interest they bring to the project, For creating content, for completing challenges that often is related to creating content about tau across social media channels. For example if you got a large influencer to report on tau chain to present our project and it gains a lot of attention then you will be rewarded for that.

Fola: With the rebranding effort we will start marketing into the blockchain space as well via a number of different methods. New website, other new materials that will help new community members become engaged.


Q: Is it possible to refund my BTC if I participated in the ICO?

Ohad: There are no refunds in the participation of the ICO. As you can see we have made quite a lot of progress on development and we hold ourselves to these obligations so we are committed to developing this project and will continue to do so.


Q: Does the team have any plans to do an ICO refund like NEO did? When can we see a release of Tau?

Karim: Tau is our full platform and it depends on many core technologies and components of IDNI. Not just TML which in itself is still in development. Other components such as the internet of languages, the scaling of discussion features and the mapping of opinions. All of these need to be implemented before we can release Tau. Since some of those efforts are very much still in progress  I can’t give you an exact date for the release of the entire Tau Platform but I can promise we’ll address that in the next call.

Karim:
The month of November has been characterised on two fronts. TML and on AgorasLive. AgorasLive has gone through a lot of testing and benchmarking. Everyone has pitched in. Ohad, Umar, Juan have been doing a lot of testing. Tomas has implemented an importer from dpedia to TML so we can import tens of thousands real-life records and bring them into TML so queries can be executed against them. That’s been done successfully whilst he also continued to work on the TML editor. (https://tml.idni.org). Umar and Jaun, in particular, worked on another library called TPTP (Thousand Problems for Theorem Solvers) http://www.tptp.org. A very rich library of benchmark problems in Logic. Not a lot of them being relevant to us but we are working on the important parts. They’ve also kept working on testing the proof of extraction, finishing the debugging of that part. Murisi continued his very productive streak this month. Helping with testing and implementing three distinct algorithms. One for minimising and eliminating redundant rules. Another algo for transforming first order logic with TML into pure TML and the 3rd to transform unsequenced transformations into sequenced transformations. A lot of progress on the TML side. We want to emphasise even though we are working on Second-order logic and other research type features we’re focusing on testing in anticipation for a release soon. On the Agoras Live side we’re very close to wrapping up the first version. The first version Andre and Moaz put the finishing touches on the website. In particular Andre worked on implementing the strong data storage and symmetric encryption on the browser side that, in the future, that feature will be used to store users private key on the private side. This is all part of the payment system for Agoras Live which is not an easy thing to do right now. We are working on integrating with exchanges such as Whitebit and Bittrex. We’re having a lot of back and forth with them on the design and the workflow. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for our users but the exchanges have security concerns of their own so there are trade offs we are having to make. Finally, Ohad, Fola and I are working on several strategic initiatives we perhaps will talk further about next month.
 
Murisi:
I’ve been working on a few algorithms this month. I’ve been working on a conjunctive containment algorithm and a conjunctive query with negation algorithm which essentially will be used to tell whether if between two queries; are the results of one query a subset of the results of another query. We can use this algorithm to eliminate redundant queries. Also, if you have redundant parts of a query they can be removed without changing it’s meaning. I’ve also worked on an algorithm that if you can reduce or minimise rules then the solver will be able to compute the results of the queries faster for the end user. Another algorithm is for finding homomorphisms between query bodies. This algorithm finds out whether one query is a part of another query. Whether one query fits into another query syntactically. If we can figure out how different queries fit into each other then we can do something like factorisation of queries where we essentially express one part of a query using another query. If we can do that then again we can reduce the amount of work the solver has to do and the end result will be the user gets a faster results for their queries. ANother algorithm I have worked on is one to convert First-Order Logic TML into pure TML. This is to enable users to interface with TML in a more convenient manner which allows them to use the rules of First-Order Logic and still have the solver compute the correct results for them. Another algorithm was for sequencing transformations. The essence behind which is it’s easier for developers to optimise TML queries whilst not having to pay attention to the order in which things happen. So we are allowing developers to optimise teamwork queries without order of execution and then automatically just sorting the order of execution afterwards. This should speed up development of TML optimisations. Other than that I’ve done some mathematical proofs in order to determine the lower bounds of the sizes of TML interpreters written in TML so that we know what is possible. Next month I hope to start on the binary decision trees and some of the cache optimizations in there. Once again, to speed up the speed of the solver.

Umar:
This month I have been looking into how to extract the proofs properly. There were some features that were not working so I started debugging that. It’s important because once you have a proof you will also be able to extract the parse tree out of it also. In the master branch we have a few issues which took a significant time in debugging and I’ve worked with Tomas on what could be the reasons for those bugs. It works with non-recursive programs. You can extract the proof easily for simple programs but for complex programs with recursion we are seeing faults and bugs so that has taken most of my time. I’ve looked into the suitability of how we can look into the TPT format and how we mapp into our format. First-Order Logic so there is quite a bit of similarity and I believe we will be able to get it translated. The goal here is to benefit as much as possible with whatever we are doing with our First-Order Logic within TML. If we can translate from TPT format directly to our first autologic format then whatever transformations processing we are doing to our First-Order Logic within TML, all of that will be reused. Next month I will continue with concluding and getting results on the proof extraction.
 
Tomas:
This month I was working on the online editor for TML. [https://tml.idni.org] regarding automatic deployment so it’s easier to keep it updated with the latest version of TML. I’ve created Shell scripts to download and convert dpedia files into TML. Dbpedia is a rdf formatted data from Wikipedia. It will be for future benchmarking and RDF support for TML. I’ve also spent some time on how to do transformation of nested programs and program sequences into a single program. Lately, I’ve been assisting Urmar with debugging proof extraction.

Kilian:
This month’s first week started with the Whitebit AMA with Andrew from whitebit. He was very open to answering any questions and outlined that community members had no issues with whitebit whilst using the exchange. He provided a lot of background information about the company and was very transparent. The community had positive feedback resulting in increased liquidity to trade agoras on the Whitebit exchange. I’ve done some more follow up with some professors in the field or KRR and finite model theory. We are at the stage where we are mostly intensifying existing relationships and we hope to announce more concrete details about certain partnerships that have evolved from that. Most of my time went into working on a presentation about IDNI, Tau-Chain and Agoras we can use for various purposes such as marketing, conferences and video creation. I've also been refining the ambassador program. I’ve created a list of content distribution channels that can be used by ambassadors to distribute existing content but also community content. I’ve created a list of content that already exists and also a list of possible topics for blog articles that will be utilised in the future content creation by the community. I’ve also worked on creating a code of conduct to enable us to have a certain standard of what we expect from our community in terms of how they interact with each other. Ie. We are totally against discrimination, hate speech or sexual harassment which should eb obvious but some people it’s not so we want to make sure guidelines are inplace for when our community scales. The guidelines are up for community review so once I’ve established it I will share. This month the community member of the month is Jamie. He receives a reward of 100 agoras for his ongoing work on Tau.guide (https://tau.guide) and actively contributing to the telegram and twitter discussions.

Mo’az:
This month I have been busy polishing Agoras.Live. We hope to launch soon. I workinged on a couple of features that we should publish. Things like email templates, user profile,storage and search. Other features to polish include a design system we’ll likely continue to polish after launch including dispatching through the new design system I designed. I will continue to work on an updated version of agoras live after the launch adding additional features. I’ve included a feature that will show the publications IDNI are involved in.

Andrei:
Last month I was working on implementing our first approach to the payment system. It will use crypto currency exchanges for all the operations. It will allow our users to deposit or withdraw money or send money to each other with ease. Let me show you a simple example (https://youtu.be/9_o1PDktFtg?t=1105)
Suppose we have a Whitebit account holding some Agoras. In order to connect to our platform it needs API and API keys of course. We will create it automatically but now I will show you how it works manually. Let’s go to the API keys and choose the trading and deposit withdrawal key. We generate a new key and activate it. Now we go to our wallet. Suppose user clicks on deposit. It will lead them to a crypto currency exchange form for depositing money but prior to that the user will need to input their sensitive data. All this data will be stored locally, encrypted using AES GCM encryption with SHA 256 hash. Why do we need it? Because we want to securely exchange whatever sensitive information users want to exchange between each other. For example, payment codes that Whitebit has. Once connected to white bit we can see your Agoras balance and current exchange rate in US dollars. I’m working hard this month on automating the deposit, withdrawal and payment API connection and key generation with the exchanges and Agoras Live and I hope to finish everything by the end of this year.
 
Juan:
As per Karim’s summary I have approached the TPTP library in order to establish a set of problems from there to help us verify our First-Order Logic resources and also to use them as a baseline benchmark. We don’t initially expect to compete against C3 solver we’ll be using as a reference for the verification but we hope this test suite will help us to gain more comprehension of how our performance lags and of course in terms of better verifying the results we receive. We are addressing CNF and FOS formulas for DFF which involves First-Order Logic type. I think we will still need to do some development and design in our system. That’s all for the DPTP and around the Second-Order Logic feature we have a very primitive approach especially for horn Second-Order existential horn second Logic so we have been also approaching two optimisation problems. Mean Vertex and Max cut from the Ebbinghaus book where we need to handle mean and max quantifiers over viable relationships. That will be our target second use case for the Second-Order Logic feature. We look forward to it helping us in the conception of our system. We also have on hold the graph isomorphism. This is on hold due to some initial issues in our power representation. It has already been very deeply addressed by Ohad so I think in the mid term we should reach a solution there hopefully. FInally on the Agoras Live side we have started on the new version of the payment system. As we mentioned before we left the Lightning Network based implementation to move to a custom design involving a micropayment channel as defined by bitcoin. We are still talking about the Agora’s tokens running on the Omni layer. In this case we are basing our payment channel on Agoras Live on a peer-to-peer connection between browser based clients from scratch based on WebRTC which should help users exchange multi signatures in order to fund and close the payment channel according to the session. There are several considerations, as Karim mentions, to be done but we still move forward on this particular effort.
 
Fola:
My administrative tasks continue for IDNI and that’s what I’ve been working on. On top of that I’ve been working on the ERC-20 token swap and it’s feasibility. We have decided to go ahead with that swap in accordance with what the community wished. We’ve listened to you and have known this is what you’ve wanted so we’ve decided to go ahead and move to ERC-20 which is coming soon. There will be some swap partners involved to handle that. This is going to be excluding the US so anyone outside the US will be able to swap with one of our swap partners to the ERC-20 token so we won’t be handling the swap ourselves but a number of exchanges will be handling that swap. We have also hired Kane Davis as a designer to work on the IDNI Logo and graphics Logo. On Agoras live legal we’ve had some documentation drawn up from our legal firm and also on the Agoras Live front I’ve been liaising with Whitebit and another exchange for integration purposes. On top of that we have added some new service providers for the company which makes our lives easier so we can move faster internally. We are talking with a new exchange and I’ll share further details once that relationship is established. Speaking of exchanges we have been speaking with UKEX (https://ukex.com) which is buying out BCEX and they will be listing our ERC-20 token when it is available.
 
Ohad:
I’ve been involved in lots of things you want to hear about. I’ve also been involved with conversations with three professors and one graduate student about knowledge representation languages especially at the scope of languages that may self interpret and also about solving Second-Order Logic and a lot of research that came out of those conversations. THey basically approved my impression that the Second-Order Logic solver we speak about doesn’t exist and will be a great innovation in the field of automation improving. In addition I have been putting a lot of thought into the move to ERC-20 token so stay tuned regarding this point.
 
 
Q&A:

Q: Why is the product needed before going to Agoras ERC-20, but not required as an Omni token?
A: We could swap to ERC-20 but were concerned about violating U.S regulations that have come in recently. In order to make sure we’d pass those regulations we did need a product available. However, as mentioned we are now moving to ERC-20 allowing Non-U.S token holders to do so.

Q: How will Tau-Chain Benefit from Agoras.Live?
A: AgorsLive is important in the scheme of things due to having a knowledge market. As explained in the Whitepaper. The reason we give it priority is to apparently meet regulatory requirements in the USA.

Q: Will you give an in-depth analysis/demo of AgorasLive and how to use the TML playground?
A: The TML playground (https://tml.idni.org) is the first public demonstration of the TML language and its usefulness and it’s really a demo as you think of it. You can see at least 8 examples of some basic TML programs in the upper left corner of the screen. We agree it would be a good way to start feeding the platform with good content and getting people to know TML. A TML and AgorasLive demo will come out closer to release.

Q: Why does the team hold so little Agoras tokens right now. WIll this have an impact on the rate of development in the future?
A: The team will hold 3% (1.5 million) Agoras tokens. After the agoras coin will be ready, since we promised and of course we will fulfill, we will burn all unsold coins once the agoras coin is ready. We intend to sell also the unsold coins sometime in the future in order to fund the development and indeed those 3% are for after agoras is ready.

Q: What is being done to fix liquidity?
A: Well to fix liquidity we can only do what we can do. We cannot manipulate the market but we can continue to fulfil the promises.

Q: Will Agoras become the governance token of Tau-chain and will there be Airdrops?
A: The way we release Tau, it will come with no governance mechanism and with no coins. It will all be up to the users. We cannot on one hand put a system of decentralised democracy on the table and then on the other hand also set it’s walls and be the dictators so it will all be up to its users.

Q: How big of a competitor is OpenAi’s GPT-3 to us?
A: GPT-3 is about machine learning which is a kind of artificial intelligence which relies on probability and about trying to guess predictions. Tau is based on a completely different kind of artificial intelligence which is Logic. Which is nothing to do with probability but about absolute statements in the logic and knowledge of representation languages

Q: Ohad, are there other blockchain projects that impress you and would any of them be suitable for collaboration?
A: I admit I haven’t researched most of the blockchains projects, especially in the last few years as there are many. There is nothing too exceptional that comes to my mind. I’m not aware of something that looks like a good candidate for collaboration but perhaps I’m wrong.

Q: How will AgorasLive stack up to other products you will release, in terms of the amount of features from the Tau technology that will be present within them? Once agoras Live is released, what is the next product release on the roadmap?
A: We start from there and we will also release TML and we start working on a discussion platform which brings me back to my first point. The discussion over Tau may take the form of formal language and may take the form of free language. The form of free language is what AgorasLIve intends to supply. I think it will be too naive to think that, at least at the beginning, people will use mostly formal languages without any natural language. I believe it will be that freestyle kind of knowledge that will be widely used over the platform.

Q: How do you manage the mismatch between formal logic, not just the way people speak, but the way people think?
A: I don’t claim to close the gap to even tell what exactly is the mismatch but Tau is not only a self defining system but also a system defined by its users but also the languages are defined by the users and by that evolve with time. I think with time the formal languages over Tau will become more and more close to the way humans use them.

Q: With such a flexible translation system, what constraints do you put in place to make sure that things are still comprehensible?
A: THere is a whole field about Knowledge representation what we call for short KRR. Knowledge representation and reasoning and recently we started cooperating with the leading researchers of this field. There is also a lot of thought by the academic community put into how to encode the knowledge and we definitely go this route and again this will also evolve with time. We don’t claim to have every solution for everything but the whole point of Tau is to evolve.

Q: How does the system handle rich proofs?
A: Everyday knowledge discussion subject and issues, proofs and arguments are not so long and difficult as in mathematics. There is a formal proof of some theorem in mathematics that only a computer can find and it takes two terabytes but we don’t give social, political, and so on arguments that take two terabytes. Mathematics is intended to deal with such complex fields of knowledge but we don’t see them in everyday life.

Q: What is the motivation for developers to start using TML now?
A: TML is yet to be developed very much but to speak about TML as it is right now in many cases it is much easier to express in a much shorter way what we want the machine to do. For example, in the use of First-Order Logic it  makes things much simpler, way more than other common programming languages

Q: Is the 15% bonus still planned for Agoras holders that didn;t move their tokens in accordance with the Bonus requirements? (https://tau.guide/docs/quick-start/#7-bonus-for-agoras-token-holders)
A: Yes. We cannot take a promise back. What is promised is promised.

Q: When will the mainnet be available?
A: Currently we are working on putting the finishing touches to AgorasLive. That should be done by the end of this year. On the Road map next is TML 1.0. We’ve recently put out the TML playground. We’ll wait for user feedback on TML 1.0. THen depending on how that goes that will determine our time frame for mainnet.

Q: Do you already have an idea of who will be the early adopters of the platform? How are you planning to reach out to them?
A: Because our overarching consideration is to make the platform easy to use. THis platform can be used by anyone. Anyone who has knowledge. For example, language teachers, software developers, veterinarians, doctors, psychiatrists, corporate law jurists, tax advisors, Chefs or maybe mothers wishing to share how they look after children.
Initially our outreach will happen through media outlets. I;m trying to get coverage in respected media outlets. First in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space as they already understand our product. Second, once we have identified specific verticals of professionals that are looking for a solution we offer. For example, Coaches, due to covid restrictions cannot meet their potential customers directly then we will focus outreach more directly towards those specific verticals.

Q: Why did the team Veto the move from ERC-20 before and why are we doin it now?
A: we’re not so close to the main net release now. As the community wishes, we are now moving towards an ERC-20 token now excluding the U.S as a jurisdiction that can be allowed to swap. Previously we were considering an option for having everyone swap but now we are doing the former.

Q: Are the Tau-chain website revamp and logo redesigns still in the works and when can we expect this to launch?
A: Yes, It’s still in the works. It hasn’t been designed just yet. We’ve been working on mapping out the ideas and what we want and trying to find the right designer. It's taken us a little while to do that, to make sure we find the right person. The artist’s name we now have is Kane Davis who is a very good designer. Very happy to have him on board. We have a shell of a website design currently on how we want the website to be. The first step for us was to really think about the impression we want to give and we’d like to do things designed in a substantial way.

Q: Has there been any development on the Blockchain side of the project. What is the ETA on the main net
A: As we mentioned earlier our next release is TML 1.0. We’ll await feedback on that before starting development on Tau-chain mainnet. We don’t have a definitive release date yet.

Karim:
We’ve had another very productive month. Here is a quick overview of what everybody has done. A deeper dive will follow. Andrei and Mo’az redesigned the front page for the agoras.live website. Andrei implemented a lot more features. The biggest one being moving from Jitsi video conferencing system to the Big Blue Button conferencing system which is working a lot better than Jitsi which was showing some limitations. Among some of the features that Andrei implemented are the label searches, developer of the month and the user ratings as well. Juan has continued working on the first order logic. At the request of Ohad, Juan has implemented the less than constraints in the First Order Logic quantifiers as well as the min and max quantifiers. He has also helped Murisi in debugging the Eval grammar. As far as Second Order Logic is concerned he is continuing research on representing the power set with some help from Ohad; It’s a very challenging problem. Thomas has continued working on the TML IDE. https://tml.idni.org . He refreshed the IDE, bringing it up to speed with the rest of the codebase. He’s implemented nested programs which was a big accomplishment. He’s also Implemented the “IF” and “WHILE” conditions. Murisi, who is the newest part of the team hit the ground running and implemented two major features called “Quote” and “Eval”. He implemented it for an arbitrary length TML program. He has started progressing on the Conjunctive Query Requirement also known as “CQC”.

Murisi:
I implemented “Quote” and “Eval” and I did it in successive iterations. With the current implementation of Quote and Eval it should support Propositional Logic and it should also support First Order Logic. It works for arbitrary complex TML programs. This is achieved by using a tree like structure which essentially means you can have deeply nested existential quantifiers. The present implementation should actually be enough to support self interpretation so you should be able to call Eval on a program containing Eval and you can do this as deeply as you want. For instance you can call upon a program containing Eval which is also itself evaluating another program containing Eval. Right now, we need to comprehensively test this and make sure it’s working for larger sized programs. I’m coordinating with Juan on that front. This is important in the context of TML because there is a need for self reference. We are interested especially about topics such as Self-Referential Law. We need to be able to encode the logic of Self-Referential Laws in TML. The next thing I have started working on is Conjunctive Query Containment and to this end I have started producing SAT formulas which encode Homomorphisms between different TML queries. The importance of this is that if we can tell if two queries are equivalent or if the results of one query are contained within another query then we can optimise TML better. If you know if one query is contained within another query then you can eliminate the first theory and give the latter theory. The more we can recognise equivalent theories, the more we can eliminate queries. The more we can do both those things will mean the less computation we will have to do, meaning less duplicated computation.

Tomas:
This month I was working on the online editor for TML. [https://tml.idni.org] I’ve revived my old work from over a year ago and I’ve finished syntax highlighting and some UI . Then I implemented nested programs so now you can have several programs in a sequence and use curly brackets and also take a program and have it inside another program. If there is a program inside another program it’s nested and acts like another program in the sequence. So when the current program finishes, it runs the next in sequence of all the nested programs. This feature allows structuring of code and allows to implement conditions for “IF” and “WHILE”. For this I edit the transformations of each nested program into several steps, like phases. Each program there are facts which have been added. Facts which are deleted and also rules which are executed. So this is in three steps which happens in each program and I need to transform every program, every fact add or fact deletion to a rule so I can later make it conditioned by “IF” or “WHILE”. For “IF” and “WHILE” you can use First Order formula and this is translated into a rule which guards the asset program.

Kilian:
This month as usual I started with the transcription of the monthly update and you can find it in the r/tauchain subreddit as usual. At the same time I’ve been looking to get our community members more engaged. We had one community member offering their support in handling the transcriptions of the monthly updates so we are glad to have their help in doing so. I’ve also done further aggregation, outreach and follow-up of scientific researchers in the fields of KRR, Finite Model Theory and just recently, in the scope of BDDs. We had various interviews with promising researchers in the fields of KRR and Finite Model Theory and hope that soon we’ll be able to announce partnerships that we have formed in that regard. We’ve also organised an AMA with an indonesian telegram community called Bang Peteng [https://t.me/bangpateng_group]. I’ve done the pre and post organisation of that AMA. We got a lot of interesting questions. Here is the recap of the AMA - https://www.bangpateng.com/ama-recap/ama-recap-idni-8/ . I’ve used these questions and answers to also populate our twitter channel. It was a good experience to do this AMA, to get all the content and to be able to answer all the respective questions. We also got various new members on our telegram and youtube socials. The members that actually joined weren’t really active so we’re not sure if these new members are 100% legit or bots. We had a call with https://www.horizen.io. A potential partner for doing the Agoras Swap from Omni protocol. We discussed if it would be suitable for us to switch, not to a ERC-20, but to Horizen as we know one of the main concerns of our community is access to liquidity. However, Horizen wasn’t able to provide a platform like uniswap or other dex’s where liquidity is guaranteed. Because of this we decided not to do a swap to Horizon but at the same time we are thinking maybe we can still have a symbiotic relationship with them. For example, licensing TML as a decidable contract language to them. These are just thoughts for now whilst we develop products. I’ve been refining the ambassador program. So far applications have been minimal and I wish to change this by making the program more gamified; where lots of our core community members can participate and can gain points by completing various challenges. For example, content creation like blog articles, Videos, Infographics or hosting webinars or meetups. The goal is to then have a leaderboard where we show the progress of all IDNI ambassadors. After a certain period of time, perhaps four months, the top 100 IDNI ambassadors will receive the share if the rewards pool that’s been reserved for the ambassador program. I’ve also done some outreach, some advertising, to get some local community managers on board. Specifically looking for people in countries where crypto is quite popular like Korea and Japan. We’ve had a few prospects but no candidate that’s convincing but it is an ongoing goal for us to establish local communities in these areas. There have been some concerns within our community about using whitebit.com as an exchange for buying and selling Agoras. The Whitebit team has been very open with us in terms of communication so we are hosting an AMA with them on 4th November 4pm CET. We invite you to ask any relevant questions you have. Questions can be proposed using the following form https://forms.gle/MF4FJ48YreEKQ89Q6 , to myself through Telegram / Discord or live during the AMA itself. Last but not least, I have found a virtual conference called Decidim fest 2020. The topic being “Democracy and Technology in Times of Emergency” https://meta.decidim.org/conferences/decidimfest2020/ . They host a panel called participation by design and I think it’s quite fitting of our project so I’ve been writing to them asking if we can participate. I may be tweeting about this, I’d appreciate any community assistance in retweeting my request. The more attention it receives the higher the chances of it being spotted. Thank you.

Umar:
Over the last month some initial days were spent on doing documentation for EBNF and macros. Then we looked into how Inaudible [17:30] searching can be used to detect some facts while looking at the grammar without the usual TML’s fixed point calculation algorithm. That would make the system run faster. We did that for our built in null productions. We also developed an algorithm to detect cycles because if you cycle with non terminals then you can’t map them to regular expression matching. There were some bugs in the First Order Logic Conversion from the grammar so we fixed that with a simplification of that code.

Andrei:
Last October was a very productive month indeed. I am almost done finishing all basic features of the Agoras Live platform. Let me show you what I have done so far. [https://youtu.be/KrPxVHxvXuk?t=1130 ] First of all, I‘ve implemented “Person of the Day”. You can see it on the left. It is a user that is chosen once every day out of all the users of the platform who has their profile filled with profile picture, description and rate added. Next, I’ve implemented infinite scroll. Now you can browse through users infinitely. Next, I’ve completed the Login and Registration system. Now it allows me to easily login using an external platform. For example, let’s create a completely new user using facebook.. And it’s done. I added a new user only using Facebook. Let’s go to the next profile for the next feature. I’ve implemented Tags. Now you can add whatever Tags you like. For example, let's add “Software” and “Tech”. Et Voila, we now have Tags. The Tags are searchable and browsable. For example, let’s look for our Albert Einstein and click on this Tag… and here it is. Next, Let’s go to Albert Einstein for more. I’ve completed the normal rating system. Now I can rate the user I had experience with. For example, I had a call with Albert and I can rate him three stars, no no, 5 starts of course! Next, I finally moved our base platform from Jitsi to Big Blue Button as it is much more suited for our needs. Let’s make a call using the new platform to show it functioning... It’s me on my mobile. Next month I will be testing everything and moving onto the payment system.

Juan:
As per Karim’s summary I have advanced this month with a development effort mostly concentrated on the First Order Logic support. We’ve had several items to review and to extend its functionalities. We have been elaborating on several tests, plus fixes to implementation and wrapping up several open threads there. On the Second Order Logic I’ve been mostly focused on analysing the combinatorics of alternative representations to the power set. They are all mostly extensions to what is a BDD. As a general guideline right now we are sticking to BDDs as we have them with a deeper analysis that Ohad is doing over the Boolean function. In that particular topic we still need to make progress to wrap up what we are looking forward to doing. What I am going to do next is share my screen [https://youtu.be/KrPxVHxvXuk?t=1443 ] and do a quick demo of a couple of First Order Logic formulas we are already successfully computing. It’s worth mentioning that we still need to fix and we are aware of some issues in implementation but the solution is already in the design table. Here is the first formula we are going to share. It is binary addition for integers. This formulation comes from Neil Immerman's book in descriptive complexity. It’s Proposition 1.9, where he states that addition is first order definable. Basically, here you have two integers a and b of eight bits. We are encoding them as setting true to each bit which is 1 otherwise the bit is false. Bit 0 is the most significant bit while 7 is a less significant bit. So here are our numbers and you can see that it carries computed as a quantified boolean function. You can see over here that this carry comes from this part of the formula. When these two carry they come from this part of the formula so we pay attention to both parts of the carry formula. Over here we have the final solution formula which combines the carry ins with the bits of each of the numbers. So this is the basic execution. We can see that the solution has a 1 for the most significant bit and three 0s in the less significant bits as we are clarifying over here. These are the numbers you can just check the correct result. For the second formula, Murisi has mentioned he has made progress with the Eval functionality so what I did on the logic solver side is to test what the formula would be from the Eval resolution. In this particular case we have the transitive formula as it is stated in appendix E in the white paper [www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf ] and by defining the transitive closure logic formula we can compute for any relationship we state as input. Over here we have the basic example running and over we can see the transitive closure of the provided input over here. I look forward to publishing this first order logic solver, available for everybody with completed and extended functionality as soon as possible.

Fola:
We’ve been having discussions with a Law firm in the US called Sullivan Law and they have been giving us some advice as it relates to us swapping from Omni to ERC-20. We want to stress that this is something on our to do list and is something we can focus further on once the Agoras Live platform has been launched for many reasons which include the fact It will need to have a legal opinion for the US market. This can only come once Agoras.Live is released. I’ve also been working on research for marketing and design. As you now Ohad and I have been working on this design brief. Putting together something our designer can work with. It’s still a work in progress with many Ideas to put down and make sure we promote ourselves in a way which encapsulates what we are doing over the next 5 years in the future. I’ve been working administrative tasks. Setting up tasks with relevant companies. As a blockchain company it’s more of a challenge to open up accounts with different services but have managed to accomplish some of the most important ones this month. We’ve had internal discussion about how we can increase our productivity. We are putting work flows in place to make sure all of our development is at high speed and quality. As you can see from this month it’s been extremely productive with a lot of progress. Unfortunately Mark and the IDNI company have parted ways. We couldn’t synchronize our working environments so we are looking for people that are more suited to our needs, that feel they fit and fill the gaps within the company. Due to where we are currently at with development, another initiative we are working on at the moment are grant opportunities that Professor Avishy Carmi is going to be leading. We’ve been outlining some opportunities we can apply to in particular fields such as advancements in communication, big disruption, information and networks, AI. etc. So there are some opportunities we feel may be useful for us and we are in the right stage to apply now. We are in the initial stages now working on these opportunities.

Ohad:
I have been working deeply on how to solve Second Order Logic. I had a breakthrough yesterday, finding an approach that seems to avoid the main difficulties we have encountered so far. So that is very promising but needs to be studied more. I want to mention that what Murisi did is basically a full self interpreter. It’s not just Eval, it is an interpreter that we have wanted for a long time and we didn’t know how to do it. With the whitepaper I was able to come up with the initial solution and Murisi turned it into a complete solution. We have it implemented and TML is able to finally interpret itself and that is an important milestone. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_(computing)#Self-interpreter ] To elaborate on what Tomas spoke about IF, THEN, ELSE and WHILE indeed now TML is much more of a convenient programming language. You can use arbitrary first order formulas like you saw from Juan and you’re able to combine them with IF conditions and WHILE loops. There are also macros that Urmar implemented last month. We really see TML becoming much more of a usable and convenient programming language.

Q&A:

Q: How can we scale program synthesis in beta agoras when calculations seem to suggest an exponential growing search space with large complex applications? Or will program synthesis be limited to small simple algorithms?

A: Exponential complexity is even modest for synthesis. It can be way beyond exponential and indeed it can be the case just like in any setting of solving logics that the problem is not feasible and the computer doesn’t find answers in reasonable time. Of course we will need to take care of such cases. More importantly we need to be able to solve simple problems in reasonable time, as you mentioned, and this is indeed the main difficulty. We will not be able to get over the worst case running time but it should be definitely possible to solve such simple instances easily. This is basically what took the whole research of Second Order Logic. Solving Second Order Logic brute force is very, very easy. The big question is how to make it fast, at least, for these instances. This will be an ongoing effort to move the line such that more problems become feasible.

Q: Is TML currently capable of being used to optimise Tau via methods like combinatorial optimisation? If yes, Tell us more about how TML can be used to solve optimization problems, and how the knowledge market of Agoras may help with this. If no, tell us what needs to be done to reach this milestone.

A: Yes, TML is a very good tool for combinatorial optimization. Even if it is not necessarily as fast as other optermisors, at least not currently, but as Karim pointed out in the world of optimisation another big problem aside the problem of speed is how to formulate the problem. Usually you have a real life case and convert it to some standard. The optimization problem is not straightforward at all. On TML you are just able to take your real life case and ask for the optimum. So, yes, there is a strong connection between TML and better combinatorial optimization. To what extent it will be affecting optimisation of programs to run faster? This remains yet to be seen. The word optimisation here can have two separate meanings. The optimisation problems, what we call in mathematics optimisation problems and there are optimising programs. This is not exactly the same and for the latter we will indeed have to see.

Q: On the topic of optimisation, assuming we do have this ability on tau, can we apply it for business model optimisation? Including game theory?

A: Yes, indeed that would be a major use case definitely.

Q: Is feasibility totally confirmed regarding the implementation of Second Order Logic?

A: Horne and Ackermann Logic do not cover full second order logic. They cover precisely, infeasible cases. Horne, Krom and Ackermann second order to first order is very straightforward and is not going much. It is just a small and easy change of formula. For those 3 cases it is definitely feasible as you said but for full Second Order Logic it will never totally because there are proven computational complexity bounds that say it can never always be feasible but as we said before the very effort we put on this front is how to make it feasible for simple problems.

Q: What about the swap from Omni to ERC-20?

A: This is something we are looking into. At the moment the hurdles require us to have agoras.live available. That allows us to have the US legal opinion. Which then allows us to include a much larger portion of the token holders within the swap; for us to be able to swap everyone at once which is exactly what we want to do. So that's still the path. As you’ve seen from Andrei’s update things are progressing very fast so great things are happening there. I will keep you guys updated as time goes on.

Hi!

Currently the only way for US citizens to buy AGRS is via the OmniDEX: https://www.omniwallet.org/dex/overview (Token: IDNI Agoras #58).

BEWARE: Agoras Tokens #35 are worthless. Make sure you choose IDNI Agoras #58.

I'm fucked, I live in USA and cannot find an exchange that I can buy any on. had .3 worth of agrs during 2017. Please someone help.

Karim:
We’ve had a very busy and productive month in September. The biggest news is that we added two very valuable members to our team: Mark Reynolds & Murisi Tarusenga. As for a quick overview of the progress: Fola, Mo’az & Andrei have been working hard on the Agoras Live website and almost got it feature-complete in terms of the interface. The only next big task with Agoras Live is the payment gateway. We’ve already started working on that. On the TML side, Murisi & Mark hit the ground running and Ohad assigned them each major functionality in TML. Juan has finished testing the first order logic and proof execution. He’s now working on the second order logic Horn formulas. He’ll attack the Krom formulas next. Umar has made huge progress on the parsing side. He added support for EBNF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus–Naur_form) which is a standard way of specifying syntax and that’s going to be supported in TML now and we’re integrating that with the rest of the TML engine. Tomas put a lot of effort into the TML demos and it’s looking almost like we are starting with an integrated development environment (IDE) for TML.

Mark:
I’m primarily a programming language theorist although I’ve also done a significant amount of work on cryptography and security. Most of my focus has been on type theory and model theory. I think that it hopefully will allow me to make contributions to the ongoing work of the chain.

Murisi:
I’m specialist in programming language design, domain specific languages and meta programming. I’m excited to contribute to TML and I hope to be contributing especially in the areas to do with self-definition, self-evaluation and self-interpretation as that is a requirement of the TML programming language.

Tomas:
In September, we have found some new bugs which were introduced with the change of the character from two bytes to one byte. So I was fixing these bugs and I finished the Unicode support, so TML now supports UTF8 encoded data and programmers can use Unicode in TML programs for example in relation names. We also decided to bring back the online playground, so I’ve updated the Javascript build through emscripten. I’ve also revived the TML editor and it will be deployed soon.

Umar:
I’m glad to share the progress. As Karim mentioned, we have achieved the feature of EBMF within TML now so you can specify your grammars that EBNF syntactic sugar and that gets translated into simple regular grammar and then down to the TML rules. The second thing I have been working on is on introducing macros to the TML. So we have the basic macros’ functionality implemented where the programmer can specify a macro and that gets replaced wherever it’s being used. There’s some other aspect to it that if it’s a unifunction and the macro is being passed as an argument to the term, then how do we do that replacement? So that’s one of the things I’m going to work on and then the other part is that we are in the process of integrating the new changes that we make to the grammar specification like EBNF into the main processing engine. So that is some of the work that we we’re currently doing and we’ll continue to do that.

Mo’az:
For this month, I’ve been away for most of the month because I had an emergency in my health. But I contributed to wrapping up Agoras Live. We are reaching the point where we have Agoras Live ready to be launched and people can see and use it. I worked on the group session and also I’ve been working on another iteration on the front page of Agoras Live which is really important and there is something that’s very solid. Also, I’ve looked into a lot of things in terms of mobile views, how the pages appear on mobile and when notifications open.

Andrei:
This month, I’ve been working on some server tasks like tweaking Jitsi to work the best way possible. Also, I fixed some issues with GitHub CI, so it now builds successfully and going back to our Agoras Live, let me share my screen (https://youtu.be/oVV50WvGcT0?t=525): Ok, so what we have here now? Now we have the ability to add a group session. For example I am Albert Einstein and I want to add a new group session. I choose the length and topic of the session. Now we will login as a normal user, go to Albert Einstein’s profile and we see the lecture, can join it and by that we will receive a personal link to the lecture in time and also reminders regarding it. Now, within our appointments page, we have the booked lecture and we can also see a history about our previous sessions in the “Session List” tab. You now also can write a support ticket if you have an issue with the site.

What now still is left with Agoras Live is to improve the front page, to polish everything, testing of the group call feature and of course, the major thing that is left, is the payment system to be working. On the Jitsi side, everything is working, we have it implemented and hopefully, next month, we will have some demo version.

Juan:
This month I’ve been focusing on the second order logic support following the research Ohad has been doing for the first part of the year. So basically what we are reaching now is a Horn formula solving capability still on primitive status. When addressing this kind of second order logic support, we start needing to carefully design and consider how to handle the structures involved in second order logic, say the universe representation, the variables or the constants that we are handling in order to work with the formulas and these status we are dealing with very I would say naive but synthetic formulas that we are using then to direct the design and development and we are currently starting to consider more harder problems, particularly on the existential second order domain in order to verify and to confirm what we have been addressing so far. This is mostly what I can share right now about second order support. We have been also doing some effort in order to review some major parts of the TML system in order to bridge or to close a gap between the front end and the back end of our system. Looking forward for scalability and maintenance improvement and also to allow all the new participants or contributors to the system to make the path into the walk a little bit more flat.

Fola:
From my side of things, I’ve been working on the hiring alongside with Karim in order to find Murisi and Mark. Mark has a fantastic background – we’ll be uploading his and Murisi’s bio to the IDNI website, so we’re extremely happy to bring them on board.

One thing I will say is just in terms of the progress that we’ve made has far exceeded my expectations as it comes to TML and I think just from a project perspective I think that most business is more of a hiring issue and I couldn’t be happier with the team we have right now. Really solid progress being made right now internally and with the products.

Another thing I’ve been working on is the token swap. We’ve decided to delay moving away from an Omni token to ERC-20 for various reasons. I just want to make sure that everything we do is done in a way that makes sure that we’re able to get on the exchanges and that it’s as simple and easy to do as we want it to be. So there will be a few minor delays while we’re figuring things out. But we don’t expect that to be very long. I’ve also been working on the marketing with Kilian who will be up next. I’ve been working with Kilian on the marketing. He’s working on a posting channel for the social channels. He’s been much more active on Twitter which is fantastic. Also considering another Facebook page because right now the Facebook channel is a Facebook group. So we just have to figure things out in terms of do we want to have a page that limits the people’s ability to post content. We might either keep the group, create a page or just have both. I’m also working with an external company to prepare our marketing plan. From the design perspective, I believe I found the right people to redesign the Tau, Agoras & IDNI project. Right now we are working on a design brief which is far deeper and detailed than I originally thought. There are a lot of things to consider in terms of the trajectory of these projects and what we expect them to look like now and in the future. We have to consider a lot of different points in time as to how we design this.

Just internally, I’ve had a lot of discussions of how we design this ERC-20 token and what features it will have, where it’s going to be and the different effects on the token itself, such as liquidity. Beyond that, I’ve been doing the day to day administration of IDNI.

Kilian:
Transcribed past month’s video update, to be found on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/tauchain/comments/il5535/summary_of_tauchain_monthly_video_update_august/). Created an interactive version of the whitepaper for the community to directly provide feedback and ask questions within the document (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t8-BeOHPYaGkIGW0HI1SbXrm7TvI9gHO/view?usp=sharing). Finished the revamp of the Bitcointalk-Thread Post. Ohad will look over it and then the Bitcointalk-Thread will be up-to-date. Also continued aggregation, outreach and follow-up of scientific researchers in the fields of KRR, Semantic Web and Finite Model Theory. Responses include: A professor pointing out two projects that could be relevant for us: http://www.grammaticalframework.org/ (Mission: formalize the grammars of the world and make them available for computer applications)

https://www.digitalgrammars.com/ (Multilingual semantics and abstract syntax based systems for customers in law, health care, technology, and e-commerce)

Another response: German professor from the International Center for Computational Logic (https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/International_Center_for_Computational_Logic). Has been quite excited to learn about the project. Now wants to study the whitepaper more thoroughly and then make suggestions as to in which ways he’d be able to collaborate with us in terms of turning TML into a KRR language.

Two other professors from Italy were also interested in having a conversation. Scheduling calls with them.

Aggregation of US based media outlets & reporters in the sectors of technology, software & internet. Also done some outreach towards influencers & been more active on Twitter, establishing a continuous posting schedule. Also done aggregation of various relevant Subreddits to do postings there. The most interaction we got from the Singularity Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/ixjk4f/discussion_a_new_approach_towards_achieving/). Also published the Chinese Bitcointalk-Thread (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-tau-chain-agoras-5277726). Conversations with community members. Feedback has been to switch to ERC20 for benefits such as stronger liquidity in connection with Ethereum based applications such as Uniswap. Created an executive summary as a one pager to be easily shared by ourselves and the community among cryptocurrency investors. Ohad is going to rephrase certain parts of it and then it will be ready for sharing. Been looking for conferences on KRR & Logic from February 2020 on but couldn’t find any specific virtual ones. So if you as a community member know of one, let us know as we definitely are interested in being a part of it. We also established the AGRS Rewards Pool serving as a fast ramp to reward community participation. By that, we now have a monthly reservoir of AGRS to rewards proactive community engagement. We are looking for of participation in ways that people bring us community growth (e.g. by writing a blog post, getting us coverage in relevant media outlets, by introducing someone big to the project, creating developer tools or documentation or by doing community support. All these kinds of work are applicable for possibly getting rewarded. We value impact and quality as metrics (Such as a high quality blog post that gets shared a lot). Along with this program, we now also select the most dedicated Community Member of the Month and reward him/her with a total 100 AGRS. The winning community member of September is Dana Edwards who published an update about Tau as a blog post on Steem (https://steemit.com/tauchain/@dana-edwards/tau-update-first-order-logic-parser-and-other-good-news) and who also has been very active in our Telegram community – congratulations!

Ohad:
Has been thinking about how to structure the outer layers of TML above the BDD layers in order to support features that are implemented by transforming the TML program into another TML program. It’s good news that this number of features can be implemented simply by creating the new theme and program is always growing. So we will need a framework to make it more easily programmed and mainly he has been busy with studying the power set structure and offset of bit strings. You can think of it like a BDD of BDDs. It has some naïve structure which is not very efficient so he was looking at the geometric and combinatorial properties of those in order to come up with a better data structure and of course this should help in solving full second order logic.

Q&A:

Q: If “interesting” was defined over Tau, could interesting questions automatically be generated in the answers or knowledge discussed on Tau?

A: Ultimately, if “interesting” is indeed defined over Tau, then yes – but I don’t think that we will ever be able at least in the foreseeable future, to formalize what is interesting over Tau. We can only say about certain things that they are interesting but to have a definition about what is interesting and what not, that doesn’t look like there is a way to do so. Also, inferring from an answer what an interesting question would be is not very reasonable because an answer can be an answer of infinitely many questions. The answer “three” can be an answer to very interesting questions as well as an answer to very non-interesting questions. So ultimately there is no way back from an answer to the original question.

Q: If there is a trend, like we didn’t like tha past week of people answering a specific question to a very similar set of questions, wouldn’t that be an interesting answer that Tau can suggest?

A: On Tau, you don’t have interesting answers, you have interesting questions. You can mark questions as being interesting and Tau can automatically detect answers to questions that it knows you are interested in because you marked them as interesting. An answer cannot be interesting. You have correct and incorrect answers and interesting and uninteresting questions. But anyway, it can be that some answer is very popular and it can be because all people who give that answer are actually interested in the same question but unless that they tell us that they are interested in that same question, we don’t really have a way to know what the original question was.

Q: GitHub shows us that TML can parse itself. Does that mean that it does this in reasonable time, with the ability to conveniently extract the parse tree and modify TML’s syntax or, do we need second order logic for this?

A: Yes, well as it says there it depends on efficiency of parsing, of using the parse tree easily and it’s not related to second order logic. The main bottleneck is that the TML parser is very slow but in the design of the higher level parts of TML that I mentioned before, an important aspect of it is to make TML support not only parsing but also lexing. Usually the parsing tasks in practice are separated into lexing and parsing and you have a lexer and a parser. Theoretically, it’s not necessary but of course there is good reason why everyone does so. Instead in TML, we can separate the lexing from the parsing, even use regular expression engineering for the lexer and then the parsing after lexing should be done much more efficiently and this should finally make TML parse fast and in particular, to allow the transformations of TML programs be coded in TML itself and be then programmed and modified in a much more convenient way.

Q: What would the team first like to see developed over TML?

A: We’d like to see some software which resembles something which holds people to account. We’d like to see it being used in a way in which people are fact-checked against their previous statements. Interesting are also things that relate back to the collaborative development abilities. It’s quite interesting to see what would be developed and how quickly this outcome would be processed and created by the different group sizes that would be involved. We’d like to see things such as how long it takes for certain goals to be achieved based on the group size, and the products that come out of that, as well. Other things are related to the Internet of Languages and seeing how fast people are going to end up writing the translators to add additional languages to TML. Observing the speed of that process will be interesting. Also, to have some community knowledge bounty. This means, a pool for the community which they would fund themselves, make requests for knowledge and then have the ability to pay for the knowledge to be added to the system. Even better would be if the system could generate the funds itself and then put out the requests for knowledge itself so it’s all automated so it becomes this sort of self-funding, self-requesting knowledge growth machine.

Q: Has Dragan left the team and, if so, will this impact TML’s development?

A: No, it doesn’t. Dragan completed the tasks he was working on and now works on a task by task basis. We did end up making the decision to add Murisi and Mark to the team to work on TML. This year for TML has gone far better than initially intended. Any changes we’ve made internally are extremely positive.

Transcript of the Tau-Chain & Agoras Monthly Video Update – August 2020

Karim:
Major event of this past month: Release of the Whitepaper. Encourages everyone to read the Whitepaper because it’s going to guide our development efforts for the foreseeable future.
Development is proceeding well on two major fronts:
1.   Agoras Live website: Features are being added to it, only two major features are missing
2.   TML: We identified ten major tasks to be completed before the next release. Three of them are optimization features which are very important for the speed and performance features of TML. In terms of time requirements, we feel very good to stay on schedule for the end of this year. We also are bringing in two extra resources to help us get there as soon as possible.

Umar:
Been working on changes in the string relation, especially moving from binary string representation to unistring. The idea is that now rather than having two arguments in the term, you would have a single argument for the string. Thus, the hierarchy changes from two to one and that has an effect on speed and on the storage. So the first few numbers that we calculated showed that we are around 10% faster than with the binary string. There are some other changes that need to be made with regards to the string which he is working on.

Tomas:
Had to revise how we encode characters in order to be compatible with the internet. It also was the last missing piece in order to compute persistence. The reason is that the stored data has to be portable and if TML needs characters and strings internally in the same encoding as it stores its own data, we can map strings directly into files and gain lots of speed with it. The code is now pushed in the repository and can be tested. He’s also working on a TML tutorial and likely before next update, there should be something available online.

Kilian:
Transcribed past month’s video update. You can find it on Reddit. Also, he has done more outreach towards potential partner universities and research groups and this month the response rate was better than earlier, most likely because of the whitepaper release. Positive replies include: University of Mannheim, Trier (Computational Linguistics & Digital Humanities), research group AI KR from within the W3C (https://www.w3.org/community/aikr/) articulated strong interest in getting a discussion going, particularly because they had some misconceptions about blockchain. They would like to have a Q&A session with a couple of their group members but first it’s important for us to have them read the whitepaper to get a basic understanding and then be able to ask respective questions. Other interested parties include the Computational Linguistics research group of the University of Groningen, Netherlands and also the Center for Language Technology of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. We also got connected to the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
Also has done some press outreach in combination with the whitepaper, trying to get respective media outlets to cover our project, but so far hasn’t gotten feedback back. Been discussing the social media strategy with Ohad and Fola, trying to be more active on our channels and have a weekly posting schedule on Twitter including non-technical and technical contests that engage with all parts of our community. Furthermore, has opened up a discussion on Discord (https://discord.gg/qZtJs78) in the “Tau-Discussion” channel around the topics that Ohad mentioned he would first like to see discussed on Tau (see https://youtu.be/O4SFxq_3ask?t=2225):
1.   Definitions of what good and bad means and what better and worse means.
2.   The governance model over Tau.
3.   The specification of Tau itself and how to make it grow and evolve even more to suit wider audiences. The whole point of Tau is people collaborating in order to define Tau itself and to improve it over time, so it will improve up to infinity. This is the main thing, especially initially, that the Tau developers (or rather users) advance the platform more and more.

If you are interested in participating in the discussion, join our Discord (https://discord.gg/qZtJs78) and post your thoughts – we’d appreciate it!
Also has finished designing the bounty claiming process, so people that worked on a bounty now can claim their reward by filling out the bounty claiming form (https://forms.gle/HvksdaavuJbu4PCV8).
Been also working on revamping the original post in the Bitcointalk-Thread. It contains a lot of broken links and generally is outdated, so he’s using the whitepaper to give it a complete overhaul.
With the whitepaper release, the community also got a lot more active which was great to see and thus, he dedicated more time towards supporting the community.

Mo’az:
Finished multiple milestones with regards to the Agoras Live website:
1.   Question part where people post their requests and knowledge providers can help them with missing knowledge.
2.   Have been through multiple iterations of how to approach the services in the website. How the service seeker can discover new people through the website.
3.   Connected the limited, static categories on the website to add more diversity to it. By adding tags, it will be easier for service seekers to find what they are looking for.
4.   Onboarding: Been working on adding an onboarding step for the user, so the user chooses categories of his interest and as a result, he will find the homepage to be more personalized towards him and his interests.
5.   New section to the user profile added: The service that the knowledge provider can provide. Can be added as tags or free text.
6.   Search: Can filter via free text and filter by country, language, etc.
7.   Been working on how to display the knowledge providers on the platform.

Andrei:
Improved look of the Agoras Live front page: Looks more clean. Finetuned search options. Redesigned the header. It now has notification icons. If you query a knowledge provider for an appointment, he will receive a notification about the new appointment to be approved or rejected. You can also add a user to your favorites. Front page now randomly displays users. Also implemented email templates, e.g. a thank you email upon registration or an appointment reminder. What is left to do is the session list and then the basic engine will be ready. Also needs to implement the “questions” section.

Juan:
Has switched towards development of TML related features. Been working mainly on the first order logic support. Has integrated the formula parser with the TML core functionality. With this being connected, we added to TML quantified Boolean function solving capability in the same way as we get the first order logic support. It’s worth mentioning that this feature is being supported by means of the main optimized BDD primitives that we already have in the TML engine. Looking forward to make this scalable in terms of formula sizes. It’s a matter of refining the Boolean solution and doing proper tests to show this milestone to the community in a proper way.

Fola:
Have been discussing the feasibility of a token swap towards ERC20 from the Omni token with exchanges and internally with the team. Also has been discussing the social media strategy with Kilian. As we update with the new visual identity and the branding, it’s a good time to boost our social media channels and look ready for the next iteration of our look and feel. Continuing on the aspects of our visual identity and design, he’s been talking to quite a  number of large agencies who have been involved in some of the larger projects in the software space. One being Phantom (https://phantom.land)  who designed the DeepMind website (https://deepmind.com), the other one being Outcast (https://theoutcastagency.com) who have been working with Intel and SalesForce. We aren’t sure yet with which company we go but it’s been good to get insight into how they work and which steps they’d take into getting our project out to the wider audience. That whole process has been a lot of research into what kind of agencies we’d want to get involved with. Also, with the release of the whitepaper being such a big milestone in the history of the company, he’s been doing a lot of reading of that paper. We’re also looking to get more manpower involved with the TML website. Also going to hire a frontend developer for the website and the backend will be done according to Ohad’s requirements. Also, as a response of the community’s feedback towards the Omni deck not being user friendly, he did some outreach to the Omni team and introduced them to a partner exchange for Agoras Live. They have an “exchange-in-a-box” service which may help Omni to have a much more usable interface for the Omni Dex, so hopefully they will be working together to improve the usability of the Omni Dex.

Ohad:
Finished writing the community draft of the whitepaper. The final version will contain changes according to the community’s feedback and more elaboration on more topics that weren’t inserted in the current paper, including logics for law and about the full process of Tau. And, as usual, he’s been doing more research of second order logic, specifically, Boolean options and also analyzing the situation where the formulas in conjunctive normal form trying to extract some information from such a cnf. Also, what Juan mentioned about first order logic: People who are already familiar with TML will see that now with this change, the easiness of using TML got much more advanced. In first order formulas, expressing yourself has become much easier than before.

Q&A:
Q: What is the difference between Horn Second Order Logic and Krom Second Order Logic?
A: Horn and Krom are special cases of cnf (conjunctive normal form). Conjunctive normal form means the formula has the form of n conjunction between clauses. This clause and this clause while each clause is a disjunction of atoms: It’s this or this or this or that. And now any formula can be written in conjunctive form. Any formula can be brought to this form. Krom is the case where each clause contains exactly two atoms and Horn is the case where at most one atom in every clause is positive – thre rest are negated, that’s the definition.

Q: Now that the whitepaper has been released, how do you think it will affect the work of the developers?
A: We see the whitepaper as being a roadmap of development for us, so it will essentially be the vision that we are working to implement. Of course, we have to turn it into much more specific tasks, but as you saw from the detailed progress from last month, that’s exactly what we do.

Q: When can we expect the new website?
A: We’ve just updated the website with the whitepaper and the new website should be launching after we get the branding done. There’s a lot of work to be done and a lot of considerations taking place. We have to get the graphics ready and the front end done. The branding is the most important step we have to get done and once that is complete, we will launch the new website.

Q: What needs to be resolved next before we get onto a solid US exchange?
A: With the whitepaper released, that’s probably been the biggest hurdle we had to get over. At this point, we still have to confirm some elements of the plan with the US regulators and we do need to have some sort of product available. Be that the TML release or Agoras Live, there needs to be something out for people to use. So, in conjunction with the whitepaper and approval from the US regulators, we need to have a product available to get onto US exchanges.

Q: Does the team still need to get bigger to reach cruising speed, if so, how much by and in which areas?
A: Of course, any development team would like to have as many resources as possible but working with the resources we that have right now, we are making significant progress towards the two development goals that we have, both the Agoras Live website and the TML engine. But we are bringing in at least two more resources in the near future but there’s no lack of work to be done and also there’s no lack of progress.

Q: Will Prof. Carmi continue to work in the team and if so, in what capacity?
A: Sure, Prof. Carmi will continue coordinating with us. Right now, he’s working on the mathematics of certain features in the derivatives market that Agoras is planned to have, and also ongoing research in relevant logic.

Q:  Will you translate the whitepaper into other languages?
A: Yes, we expect translations of the whitepaper to occur. The most important languages that comprise our community, e.g. Chinese. What languages exactly, we cannot tell right now, but mainly the most prominent languages that comprise our community.

Q: Is the roadmap on the website still correct and, when will we move to the next step?
A: We will be revamping the website soon including the roadmap that will be a summary of what’s been published in the whitepaper but the old version of the roadmap on the website is no longer up-to-date.

Q: What are the requirements for Agoras to have its own chain?
A: If the question means why Agoras doesn’t have its own chain right now, well there is no special reason. We need to reach there and we will reach there.

Q: When Agoras switches to its own chain, will you need to create a new payments system from scratch?
A: No, we won’t have to. We will have to integrate with the new payment channel but that’s something we are planning to do anyway. We will be integrating with several exchanges and several payment channels so it won’t be a huge task. Most of the heavy lifting is in the wallet and key management which will be done on the client side but we’re already planning on having more than one payment gateway anyway so having one more is no problem.

Q: When can we see Tau work with a real practical example?
A: For examples of applications of TML, we are currently working on a TML tutorial and a set of demos. Two of our developers are currently working on it and it’s going to be a big part of our next release.

Q: How can we make speaking in formal languages easier, with an example?
A: Coming up with a usable and convenient formal language is a big task which maybe it’s even safe to say no one achieved up until today. But we solve this problem indirectly yet completely by not coming up with any language but letting languages to be created and evolve over time through the internet of languages. We don’t have any solution of how to make formal languages very easy for everyone. It will be a collaborative effort over Tau together to reach there over time. You can see in the whitepaper in the section 4.2 about “The Critical Mass and the Tau Chain Reaction”.

Q: What are the biggest limitations of Tau and, are they solvable?
A: TML cannot do everything that requires more than polynomial space to be done and there are infinitely many things like this. For example, you can look up x time or x space complete problems. We would want to say elementary but there is no elementary complete problem but there are complete problems in each of the levels of elementary. All those, TML cannot do because this is above polynomial space. Another drawback of TML which comes from the usage of BDDs is arithmetic. In particular, multiplication. Multiplication is highly inefficient in TML because of the nature of BDDs and of course BDDs bring so many more good things that even this drawback of slow multiplication is small compared to all the possibilities that this gives us. Another limitation, which we will emphasize in the next version of the whitepaper, is the satisfiability problem. The satisfiability problem of a formula without a model to ask whether a model exists – not a model checking like right now but to ask whether a model exists – this is undecidable already on very restricted classes as follows from Trakhtenbrot’s theory. So in particular, the containment problem, the scalability problem, the validity problem, they all are undecidable in TML as is and for them to be decidable, we need to restrict even more the expressive power and look at narrower fragments of the language. But again, this will be more emphasized in the next version of the whitepaper.

Q: It looks years for projects such as Maidsafe to build something mediocre, why should Agoras be able to do similar or better in less time?
A: Early on in the life of the Tau project, we’ve identified the computational resources marketplace as one of the possible applications of Tau, so it is very much on our roadmap. However, as you mentioned, there are some other projects, e.g. Filecoin, which is specifically focusing on the problem of storage. So even though it’s on our roadmap, we’re not there yet but we are watching closely what our competitors in this field are doing. While they haven’t yet delivered on their promise of an open and distributed storage network, we feel that at some point we will have more value to bring  to the project. So distributed storage is on our roadmap but it’s not a priority for us right now but eventually we’ll get there.

Q: What are the requirements in scalability, e.g. permanent storage etc.?
A: We haven’t answered that question yet.

Q: Will Tau be able to run on a mobile phone?
A: Definitely, Yes. We’re planning on being available on all computational platforms, be it a server, laptop, phone or an iPad type of device.

Q: Given a vast trove of knowledge, how can Tau determine relevance? Can it also build defenses against spam attacks and garbage data?
A: Tau doesn’t offer any predetermined solution to this. It is basically all up to the user. The user will have to define what’s criminal and what’s not. Of course, most users will not bother with defining this but they will be able to automatically agree to people who already defined it and by that import their definitions. So bottom line: It’s really up to the users.

Q: What are your top priorities for the next three months?
A: Our goal for this year (2020) is to release a first version of Agoras Live and of TML.

Q: Ohad mentioned the following at the start of the year: Time for us to work on Agoras. We need to create the Agoras team and commence work. We made a major improvement in one of Agoras’ aspects in the form of theatrical breakthrough but we’re not ready yet to share the details publicly.
Is there any further news or progress with the development of Agoras?
A: If the question is whether there has been more progress in the development of Agoras, specifically with regards to new discoveries for the derivatives market, then the answer is of course yes. Professor Carmi is now working on those inventions related to the derivatives market. We still keep them secret and of course, with Agoras Live, knowledge sharing for money is coming.