Transcript of the Tau-Chain & Agoras Monthly Video Update – November 2020
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: Andre- 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. Kilian- 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.