Topic: Tau-Chain and Agoras Official Thread: Generalized P2P Network - page 6. (Read 309533 times)

Karim:

Agoras Live:
Five functionalities complete:
1.   Registration
2.   Login
3.   User Profile Page
4.   Calendar
5.   Categories List
6.   Wallet Screen
Payments: Decided that implementing lightning would be too complex. Instead, we decided to implement our own micropayment mechanism using the native BTC multisig addresses. We are going to use the Omni wallet for payments.
TML:
Continued debugging, getting a TML demo and test cases ready.
Hiring:
More hiring efforts to increase team size.
Timelines:
Committing ourselves to a release of Agoras Live and a basic version of discussions in TML in 2020.

Umar:
Been working on making improvements to the context free grammar parsing. We now are able to add constraints to productions in the grammar, allowing us to recognize grammars that are context sensitive.
Developed test cases for that, too.

Tomas:
Fixed issues in TML and ran several steps in a TML program. Now adding more tests to make sure everything is stable and won’t break. Also been working on a TML tutorial, a recorded script based on the intro to TML which was contained in the TML Playground. Also new features are going to be covered such as arithmetics.

Kilian:
More outreach & follow-ups to potential partner universities. Positive response by a professor based in Toronto, presented to him our project. Also, response by KULeuven, Belgium, who unfortunately don’t see a good fit in our project.
We’ve had one applicant for the IDNI Grant program and currently are evaluating his proposal. Also, we’ve had an applicant from Bangalore, India for the IDNI Ambassador program and we also have been discussing his proposal.
Translation Bounties: We’ve had the blog post “The New Tau” translated to Chinese and have been reviewing the translation. We are going to publish the translation on our website and on the Bitcointalk Chinese forum section. Still to be claimed: German translation of “The New Tau”.
Done more effort on reach out to potential tribe channels: Research groups, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups. Most represented keywords: Complex Adaptive Systems, NLP, Computational Linguistics. Usual feedback: Likes but no further interaction.
Created an FAQ answering all possible questions surrounding IDNI, Tau & Agoras
Idea: Hosting a virtual panel to spread the word about our project among the scientific community, as well as to create some visual content for our community. Two professors are interested in participating, one from Argentina with a focus in semantic parsing, the other one from the University of Washington with a focus on human-computer interaction and social computing. First step: organizing a pre-panel discussion where in 1on1 calls with the professors we get an opinion of them about what we are doing.

Andrei:
Agoras Live:
Implemented mail system so users now get their mails (e.g. registration email).
Improved UX together with Mo’az, e.g. user profiles.
Token creation for accessing calls to identify and charge users.
Customized Jitsi interface to suit our needs: E.g. display of how much time passed in a call and how much it costs.
Next up: Further improve UX; make sure everything works as intended.

Mo’az:
Almost finished the IDNI website.
Added two more pages: Events & Bounties in collaboration with Fola & Kilian.

Agoras Live:
Finetuned all the website’s components in collaboration with Andrei.

Juan:
Continued working on the payments system for Agoras Live. Had some delays due to the complexity of debugging such applications. Still, we made significant progress and got the funding transactions implemented over the Lightning network through the Omni layer. Spent time analyzing the minimum amount of BTC to pay for the fees associated to the Omni transactions. We aren’t using segregated witness native addresses and instead are using embedded segregated witness. So transaction sizes are enlarged and transaction fees are a bit higher. So there is a bit of finetuning analysis needed in order to enable the multisig address to pay for the closing & refund transactions. So to provide payment channels over the Omni layer, the main remaining technical detail we have to solve at this point is the closing transaction & the refund transaction.

Fola:
Have been continuing to look for great talent in different areas.
Continued working on website with Mo’az and Kilian.
Been working on the branding for Tau & Agoras. Been getting external support to make sure the branding for Tau & Agoras will be as professional as it can be.
Working on marketing efforts needed for the release of Agoras Live to get the media pack for marketing ready.
Working together with external people to put a plan together for listing the Agoras token on more prominent exchanges as we get closer to release of Agoras Live.

Ohad:
Continued working on restricted versions of second-order logic to understand how to implement them. There is a translation in the literature about how to convert second-order logic by Horn into Datalog. Also, I have been revisiting papers that deal with descriptive complexity of higher-order logic. They mention that they have a translation from second-order logic to QBF. I wasn’t able to find where they explain this translation but I wrote one of them and he said he will send me the paper. If so, that will be very good because we already have a QBF solver. Any binary decision diagram is already a QBF solver, so we can just translate arbitrary second-order logic formulas into QBF. This will be very helpful for us to implement second-order logic. Also, those papers mention several aspects that are relevant for self-interpretation, the laws of laws. Apparently, they suggest that certain fragments of higher-order logic may also support the laws of laws. But this is part of the papers that I didn’t have access to, so I have to wait to get further clarification. I also pushed the whitepaper significantly this month and hope we will be finishing it soon. Also, I was thinking about some optimizations for the parser and also was looking into the Lightning network. It was my mistake that I haven’t done so beforehand and if I had done it beforehand, I would have understood earlier, that Lightning is too much. It is too drastic of a change to how traditional payments work and there apparently is no reason to believe that it is secure. So I’m glad I discovered better now than later that it’s not something we’d like to rely on, although we can have it as an optional feature.

Q&A:

Q: With the project development taking longer than other projects such as Tezos, when can AGRS holders expect something to be released and, how can you reassure us that we made the right decision?

A: With regards to when we see some releases, it seems that we will see some releases in 2020.
For comparing to Ethereum and Tezos: Let’s first talk about funding. Both projects had a lot of money. For Ethereum, the reason for is that it has probably done one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in history. It was completely lacking any kind of honesty. It was simply aggressive. None of Ethereum’s visions and promises became true. It simply became an insecure platform for scams. None of their vision of creating a world computer, of creating a better society, a better currency, became true. Because of this aggressive marketing, they not only raised a lot of money, they also took the price to be so high in the market. If you remember the campaign of the flipping, they did a whole campaign on how they would overtake the marketcap of Bitcoin. For Tezos, they made maybe the largest ICO in history in terms of money, mainly because they came at the right time, at the top of the bubble in 2017, and also their promises for better coordination didn’t come true. Their solution is based on voting and based on Turing completeness and the only reason why they managed to gain such a market cap as of today, is not because they offer better currency, better society, better anything. It basically is a Ponzi-scheme because they offer very high interest rate by very high inflation (5,51%). The only reason why people by Tezos is to get into this Ponzi-scheme. Because both Tezos and Ethereum lack any true economical or technological substance, their value will not sustain and this is true for almost all projects in the cryptocurrency world. In the software, high-tech market, if you come up with good tech and you do all the right things, you succeed big time. But if you don’t have it and you are purely relying on brainwashing people, it will not sustain. Of course, our solution is so disruptive and sustainable. We offer to do advancements for humanity and for economy.

Q: What three subjects would you first like to see discussed on Tau?

A: Of course, picking three subjects now is a bit speculative, but the first thing that comes to mind is the definitions of what good and bad means and what better and worse means. The second subject is the governance model over Tau. The third one is 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.

Q: What is stopping programmers using TML right now? If nothing, what is your opinion on why they aren’t?

A: There is nothing essentially missing in TML in order to let it release. And in fact, we are now working towards packaging it and bringing it towards a release level. For things like documentation, bug fixes, minor features, minor optimizations. We indeed actively work towards releasing TML 1.0 and then we can publish it in e.g. developers channels for them to use it.

Tau April dev update is now up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92aG_W2AVU8

Text summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/tauchain/comments/gg8p9j/summary_of_tau_chain_monthly_update_and_qanda/

Huge update with many new talents joining the team: veteran tech entrepreneur Karim, prof of quantum mechanics Carmi, artistic web dev Mo'az, experienced community manager Kilian and expert programmer Umar

Thanks for sharing this, Eventine!

Here is a glimpse into Ohad's new blog post:

Ohad just released a new blog post: Agoras and the Economics of Knowledge

http://www.idni.org/blog/economics-of-knowledge

This new blog post goes into detail about how Agoras will take advantage of Tau's tech to become the first knowledge to cash market economy

Done!

Thank you for the introduction and for continuously keeping our Bitcointalk community updated with the most recent developments of the project, Eventine.

Your support is highly appreciated!


I'm happy to now be a part of the IDNI and Tau-Chain project. 

Please, if anyone of you has questions or suggestions about the project, feel free to post them.

March dev update now out! Please weclome Kilian to the team
Take care during these challenging times everyone

https://youtu.be/GWx5vZsW3Ck

Tomas

- Worked on memory mapping. It allows us to work with very long files and it is also a great way to delegate memory management to operating system.

- Continued on the serialization API. It can work with the memory mapping.

- Rewritten some of my old code regarding outputs and its limitations.

- Updated or added tests for outputs, parse errors, serialization and memory mapping.

- Currently working on memory mapping of the bdds' and also mapping of the TML's input. After that will continue to work on builtins required for reimplementing the bot in TML.

Andrei

- Wishes every well.

- Implemented debug continuous integration. This allows us to check every commit automatically (cpp, clang etc. checks) for common problems.

- Also made coverage report which tests coverage of code

- Working on http models for TML and will integrate it

Juan

- Background to arithmetic port: following Ohad's recommendations and arrive to improvements to BDD multiplications in terms of performance and execution efficiency.

- Approaching support for compound terms for BDDs, but this is a slow process. We tried a boolean transformation of BDD bits which didn't quite work but we learned a lot. Requires more studying and research.

Fola

- General work with staffing

- Kilian joins the team and will be taking over as community manager

- We want information we put out to be more consolidated and accessible

- We hope to grow the community

- Looking at 3 additional hires

- Legal side is looking good on the EU side. Looking into the US side.

Kilian

- Been following Tau since 2016

- Invites people in the community to reach out to him regarding questions, ideas etc.

Ohad

- Dragan continues work with Dynamic bit ordering in BDDs. This can be found in the forks on our github repository

- Going over literature about Boolean equations and Boolean inequalities. Boolean inequalities were an open problem until quite recently and I have more to learn here. Lattice equations and congruence relations all play a part under the field universal algebra.

- Where things stand with second order logic: Most forms of second order logic in the literature are over infinite universes and therefore not guaranteed to always returns answers. The only way I know right now of solving second order logic over a finite universe is through Boolean equations then employing the resolution method. This is not the cleanest solution.

Tables are unique in TML but in second order logic there can be many solutions to an equation. We require partially defined Boolean functions to support tables not explicitly given. Boolean equations store the data implicitly and only at the end do we solve for them to obtain the final result. This provides remarkable performance.

Therefore, we need to redesign the internals of TML such that things can be defined using Boolean equations. This also makes it easier to synthesize code.

So a search for a better method than the resolution method begins. So instead of doing Boolean algebra over the bits of the data, we want to perform them over congruence relations enhanced with complementation. This will lead to even greater compression of data and immediately support infinite universes and probably compound terms, which will lead us to a generic solver.

Ohad recently gave a presentation at Insights Online Blockchain Summit
Sign up to http://insights.finnexus.io/ and see a new video presentation by Ohad on the project!

Always like hearing a monthly update. Keep up the good work!

Might I ask to add a Discord channel at some point?

It allows for sub channels to sort various subjects, unlike Telegram where all discussions are in one chat.

February Tau monthly update video is now out!
https://youtu.be/oYRmJqhLp5g
Includes QandA as usual (QandA text summary can be found on our subreddit)

Tomas

- Adding features which enables a rewrite of the Prototype bot

- Initial networking features added so bot can expand beyond IRC. It's now possible to query TML over UDP socket directly, which allows us to run TML as a database or as a backend for execution of TML programs

- Continued work on serialization and persistence of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and TML runtime to allow restarting of a TML database backend without a need to recompress stored data through a textual form which is time and space consuming. Also usable but without memory mapping

- Created test runner script for regression testing so we can ensure old features are not broken by new changes.

Andrei

- Continued work on TML interaction playground relating to how discussions over Alpha client may look like. Showcases how discussions and code work around 2:00 in the video

- Discussion tree with mention counters implemented so we can track what's the most frequently mentioned entity in the discussion

- Will focus on TML next month

- Received friend request from Asen Lalov

Juan

- Continued on the arithmetic features. Wrapping up the features addressed over the last couple of months

- Completing two fundamental sets of operators: General operators (addition, mutiliplication, shift left and shift right) and Over BDDs operators which involved taking two sets of symbols and doing pairwise operations in only those two sets described last month. Successfully tested addition and multiplication as well as bitwise OR and bitwise XOR operators. We just need to complete bitwise NOT set of operators

- Also focusing on improving performance and implementation. Also with the help of Ohad, have been analyzing the theoretical combinations of arithmetic operators and its fundamental operations to reach the ideal implementation.

Fola

- Branding: we have a couple of designers working on a redesign of the logo and website. We're excited with the designs and can't wait to show them to the community once they're finalized

- Exchanges: two routes to get on reputable exchanges, either we have a huge community or by first getting listed on smaller exchanges and working up to bigger exchanges. Exchanges ask what other exchanges you're listed on, so for example, to get onto Gate you need to be listed on HitBTC, and to be listed on HitBTC you need to be on Whitebit etc. Which is why we've listed on Whitebit. We really want community feedback on whether you want us to be listed on HitBTC. We value your input here

- US exchanges are generally more valuable but also more difficult to get on and will not happen in the immediate future

- We also have people with good relationships with exchanges working with us (not sure audio unclear)

- Do check out Whitebit, we're had good communication with them so far. Check it out but of course as with any exchange, be cautious with your funds and don't leave them on there longer than necessary

- Hirings are taking a little longer than anticipated. Looking at an R+D position right now, and Umar will be joining in an official capacity soon, and looking for a researcher to work with Ohad

- Whitepaper is still being worked on

Ohad

- Dragan finished the difficult challenge of dynamic bit ordering of BDDs. Still need testing and enforcing strong types. Now you will need to associate a type with each variable in TML and thus we'll know how many bits to allocate for each type, potentially saving us exponential amount of time and space. This is a fundamentally big change.

- I spent a lot of time studying some rare literature that is very relevant to what we do, especially in the field if Boolean algebra. Basically they're the best methods of logical calculations derived by Bool himself 150 years ago.

- Also been trying to discover how to efficiently and soundly support compound terms. One way is to approach this from the world of monodic second order logic and view this as two relations; one of prefix-order equivalence relations and by manipulating these relations you can in turn manipulate compound terms. Another way is to use a specific data structure for terms (strings) which borrow tricks from BDDs. Another way is to enhance BDDs. We can state the problem like this: as you know BDDs represent a set of bit strings (0s and 1s), but we would like to support a set of bit strings that may be arbitrarily grouped with parenthesis in a way that has to align with unification. This also lead me to consider the problem of homomorphism between structures, trying to solve it inside our framework.

- As you know TML represents data in BDDs, well apparently there's another level below BDDs of data abstraction which is representing them as Boolean equations. BDDs can be seen as explicit solutions to Boolean equations but before solving them we can state the data in an even more succinct level than it is now. Achieving this in TML will not only lead to increase performance but also the ability to express uncertain data, among other benefits. Will also need to build a library for Boolean equations which will allow us access to more features including second order logic.

The team has been working on listings lately and the first of hopefully many more exchanges to list us recently is Whitebit.

www.whitebit.com

Whitebit is an upcoming exchange based in Europe and is integrated with CMC. We're happy to secure a listings on their platform.

Aside from another place for potential users to trade AGRS, this will also make it easier to get listed on more established exchanges which the team continue to work on.

January 2020 monthly dev update video for Tauchain is now out!
https://youtu.be/oProG45Qeow

Text Summary:

Tomas
- Improved TML debugging capabilities which allows step by step debugging
- Added ability to see changes in the program made in the database and adding debugging features to the bot. Also will soon allow adding info about database changes and reason about these changes in the program itself, eg setting up breakpoints depending on some change in the database

Andrei
- Working on TML interaction playground
- Supports creating a discussion and replying in English
- Automatically creates a discussion tree for every time within the discussion

Juan
- Continued work on arithmetic support
- BDDs multiplication problem mentioned last month was more difficult than expected. We'll soon have a prototype of a working solution better than a direct approach
- Gives an example of pairwise multiplication and 1024 bits numbers multiplication over BDDs, reducing exponential complexity
Refer to minute 7 of the video for more detailed technical explanation

Fola
- Legal work mostly done, which enables us to get onto European exchanges. Spoken to many exchanges, narrowing down what would be suitable and valuable for us. We are looking at Bittrex Global as a possibility, which the community has been asking about, among others
- Hiring: Hoping to get Umar on board next month, as well as looking for an RND manager
- Redesiging website and improve branding
- Whitepaper coming together and hopefully ready by mid March

Ohad
- Dragan continuing work on reording BDDs to make them dynamic
- Consensus detection is already working and now we can see an opinion map functioning from Andrei's update. Tomas enhanced the repl
- Helping an engineering professor complete the whitepaper
- Made some progress on second order logic mainly in adapting from the literature solving boolean equation in full second order logic. I've been considering three things:
1. gives more depth to BDDs and BDDs represent shallow data, a set of string of bits, but what if the bits represent something like a tree?
2. Considering how a generic solver would be like (fwd/bwd propagation based on unification of consequences with premises) which is set theory and is written in this way. So supporting data one step beyond BDDs allows us to get a solver for virtually any theory, especially the decidable theories.
3. Time for us to work on Agoras. We need to create the Agoras team and commence work. Made a major improvement in one of Agoras' aspects in the form of a theoretical breakthrough, but not yet ready to share details publicly yet.

The chaoex book was showing 75-100 agrs buys and sells around the median of the spread but yeah bcex didnt budge, and both coinmarketcap and coingecko show flags for chaoex. I want to trade but ive been burned on exchanges before so hodling out of this pump.

Faulty metrics either provided from the Chaoex Exchange to Coinmarketcap or by coinmarketcap themselves, the tradings which would have made for this spike have not occured in the chaoex agrs/btc list, the selling price at current time of speaking is $0,35 / 0,0041 SATS ( @ BCEX exchange )

We'll get to this given AGRS price later on this year tho 

Chaoex with spread from 3k to 30k sats all other exchanges still at like 30 cents. What is going on there?

Check out the new Tau fansite for exclusive articles and take part in the forums to get the discussion going before the real discussion on Alpha

www.tauchainfans.com