What is Tauchain & Why It Could Be One of The Greatest Inventions of All Time (Part 1: Introduction)

in #blockchain6 years ago (edited)

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In anticipation of Tau's demo some time around the end of this year, I'd attempt to publish a series of articles leading up to its release and beyond on Steem (Update @ 2019: it has been delayed as development is taking much longer than expected). If you would like to get to know what some of us think is going to be one of the greatest inventions of all time, I'd recommend you to check out http://idni.org. It seems like a foundation that we've missed out on building together since the birth of the Internet.

A close resemblance of this project is the Semantic Web, although some of us would place Tau as being far more ambitious in scope, oddly in a way that is likely more feasible with its ingenious use of a logic blockchain to power a decentralized social choice platform. I think it's impressive how singular the concept actually is, despite the unavoidable lengthy explanations that come paired with the many first-time features that Tau will provide.

Without further ado, let's explore this world-changing technology that is currently baking in the oven.

What is Tau?

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Let's begin by first checking out the opening of IDNI's website at http://idni.org:-

Tau is a decentralized blockchain network intended to solve the bottlenecks inherent in large scale human communication and accelerate productivity in human collaboration using logic based Artificial Intelligence.

Sounds fairly straight-forward at first glance, and to me, it really stands out in the cryptosphere. We now have millions and billions of people using the Internet everyday, yet we still do not have any effective means of discussing and collaborating without being all over the place. Sure, we may have been pouring a lot of our time and effort into various platforms trying to connect with others, but have things been really any different compared to a time before the Internet?

The speed of information propagation has increased by orders of magnitude, and we can reach anyone on the planet now, but it's still really up to us to be present and be able to process information in our heads before turning them into relevant knowledge for our networks.

Expanding our social bandwidth.

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Turns out, we have been experiencing a lot of trouble coming to terms with the chatter of billions of people in cyberspace. The bottlenecks inherent in our human bandwidth remain to be unsolved even with near-instantaneous communications. From governments to corporations and blockchain communities, we are all still facing the age-old problem of being unable to scale governance beyond the size of a classroom. It's just difficult to get our points across to many different people, let alone making sense of complex long-term discussions and making network-wide decisions collaboratively.

The introduction to The New Tau written by Ohad Asor explains our situation quite accurately:-

Some of the main problems with collaborative decision making have to do with scales and limits that affect flow and processing of information. Those limits are so believed to be inherent in reality such that they're mostly not considered to possibly be overcomed. For example, we naturally consider the case in which everyone has a right to vote, but what about the case in which everyone has an equal right to propose what to vote over?

In small groups and everyday life we usually don't vote but express our opinions, sometimes discuss them, and the agreement or disagreement or opinions map arises from the situation. But on large communities, like a country, we can only think of everyone having a right to vote to some limited number of proposals. We reach those few proposals using hierarchical (rather decentralized) processes, in the good case, in which everyone has some right to propose but the opinions flow through certain pipes and reach the voting stage almost empty from the vast information gathered in the process. Yet, we don't even dare to imagine an equal right to propose just like an equal right to vote, for everyone, in a way that can actually work. Indeed how can that work, how can a voter go over equally-weighted one million proposals every day?

All known methods of discussions so far suffer from very poor scaling. Twice more participants is rarely twice the information gain, and when the group is too big (even few dozens), twice more participants may even reduce the overall gain into half and below, not just to not improve it times two.

It turns out that under certain assumptions we can reach truly efficiently scaling discussions and information flow, where 10,000 people are actually 100 times more effective than 100 people, in terms of collaborative decision making and collaborative theory formation. But for this we'll need the aid of machines, and we'll also need to help them to help us.

So how is Tau actually going to solve our communications bottleneck? It will be through a highly bespoke and non-trivial implementation of a logic-based Artificial Intelligence (AI). It's worth noting that AI in this case is more of a buzzword for marketing-speak, and it is actually not of the same variety as the commercial implementations of deep machine-learning.

The distinction that must be made is that Tau is not the kind of AI that attempts to guess what the world is around them, including that of our opinions and the things we say or do. Instead, we must make the step towards communicating through Tau and what we choose to communicate will be as definite as computer programs. It can be thought of as a persistent logic companion that helps us improve the scale our reasoning, logic, and bandwidth.

We can take the time to share what we want to share on the Tau network and most of the logic-based connections and operations will happen in the background over time, even when we're not paying attention in-person. Again, the use of the word AI is a misnomer here because it usually paints the picture of AI agents attempting to mimic human autonomy. That's not what Tau is about. In this case, thinking about Tau as just a logic machine should provide better clarity on what it actually is.

The power of logic.

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To expand, here's the second paragraph found in the opening of IDNI's website that explains Tau's paradigm in logic-based communications, http://idni.org:-

Currently, large scale discussions and collaborative efforts carried out directly between people are highly inefficient. To address this problem, we developed a paradigm which we call Human-Machine-Human communication: the core principle is that the users can not only interact with each other but also make their statements clear to their Tau client. Our paradigm enables Tau to deduce areas of consensus among its users in real time, allowing the network to boost communication by acting as an intermediary between humans. It does so by collecting the opinions and preferences its users wish to share and logically constructing opinions into a semantic knowledge base.

Indeed, Tau will offer a semantic social choice platform where we can discuss and store knowledge in a logical universe that helps us organize information, thereby empowering us in highly relevant ways. If you're worried about privacy, know that Tau is first-and-foremost designed as a local client with local processing and storage. The platform itself will be deployed as a decentralized peer-to-peer network, a place where we can connect and share our knowledge-base with anyone we desire.

The only price to pay in all of these is that we must speak in Tau-comprehensible languages, which can always be added and modified over time. A sophisticated language that can be defined over Tau may closely resemble natural languages, but it is really best to expect Tau as a machine-comprehensible language that only speaks in logic. Fortunately, logical formalism is something that we can easily deal with.

So it will be up to us to communicate with our local Tau client in a way that it'll understand our worldviews. When the machine understands what we share completely in some logical, mathematically-verifiable sense, it can then connect our dots with the rest of the Tau network, effectively boosting communications beyond the limits of human bandwidth, effectively scaling our points of discussion, consensus, and collaboration up to an infinite number of participants.

Code and consciousness.

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Finally, we look at the last paragraph of Tau's introduction at http://idni.org:-

Able to deduce consensus and understand discussions, Tau can automatically generate and execute code on consensus basis, through a process known as code synthesis. This will greatly accelerate knowledge production and expedite most large scale collaborative efforts we can imagine in today's world.

Since Tau is a logic blockchain that powers a semantic social choice platform, we can leverage it to have both small and large-scale discussions about program specifications, detect points of consensus, and even generate software in the process. Being able to go from discussions to the realization of decentralized applications would mean inclusive code development for the masses. It's also a unique addition to decentralization that no other blockchain projects have even thought about.

Now that we may have come to a better understanding of Tau's emphasis on the use of logic in every part of its being, let's revisit the process description found in The New Tau to get closer to knowing what it really is about:-

We are interested in a process in which a small or very large group of people repeatedly reach and follow agreements. We refer to such processes as Social Choice. We identify five aspects arising from them, language, knowledge, discussion, collaboration, and choice about choice. We propose a social choice mechanism by a careful consideration of these aspects.

We describe a decentralized computer network, Tau Chain, and as such, which social decisions may it support? The most that computers can do is to run programs. Over Tau Chain we can gather knowledge and agree or disagree over it, and we can also actually do something and perform actions as arises from the discussion over the platform. Those actions, are nothing but computer programs. And the most important program on our scope is the platform itself.

The main choices collaboratively be made over the system, are about the system itself. Tau, is a discussion about Tau. Or in a little more elaborate yet succinct definition:

Consider a process, denoted by X, of people, forming and following another process denoted by Y. Tau is the case where X=Y.

That's the Tau. What the Tau is doesn't matter, what matters is that it can change into anything we want it to be. Further, Tau is a computer program, so we refer to a program that changes itself up to the collaborative opinions and decisions of its users.

It should be remarked that we do not let Tau guess the people's opinion, or even perform well-educated guesses as in machine learning, and that's maybe the main reason we use logic. Things said over the platform are as formal and definite as computer programs, they just deal with generic knowledge rather machine instructions.

Having that, a collaboratively self-amending program, it can transform into virtually any program we'd like it to be, or many programs at once. Indeed Tau does not speak only about itself but open for creation of any other individual or collaborative activities, such that we make it possible for small and very large groups to discuss, share and organize knowledge, detect consensus and disagreements, and coordinate actions in forms of programs.

In short, Tau is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that takes the shape of a social choice platform, and it can become anything that we want it to be, for as long as it's expressible within the self-defining and decidable logics of FO[PFP] with PSPACE-complexity. This precise specification is required to satisfy the very definition of Tau as seen in the excerpt above. Tau is also intended to be a compiler-compiler.

This is taking application-generality into a completely different direction compared to blockchains that are built specifically with turing-completeness in mind, like Ethereum. Relevant literature to check out: Finite Model Theory.

Understanding each other.

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While it's all highly technical and difficult to grasp in one seating, perhaps a better way to truly begin to understand Tau is to spend some time studying its main features. Or just wait for the product release. In any case, I will try to explore these topics in the future if my brain can still handle it:-

  • The Internet of Languages.
  • Scaling Discussions.
  • Global Knowledgebase.
  • Accelerating and Automating Collaboration.
  • Real Time Social Choice.
  • Agoras Smart Knowledge Economy.

The more I think about Tau, the more I think that it is (poetically) a logical conclusion to the way the Internet works as a protocol. It even lives and breaths logic. Not just any kind of logic, but specifically, logics that can define their own semantics and is decidable. Tau is intelligently designed to be a truly dynamic and ever-evolving blockchain.

When the Tau community intends to make changes to the network code, rules or protocols, they will simply need to express these opinions and perspectives in a compatible language over the network. The self defining logic of the Tau blockchain network will enable it to detect the consensus among these opinions and automatically amend its own code to reflect this consensus from block to block. Unlike the common method of voting, Tau’s approach will take into account the perspectives of the entire community, where people will be free to vote and propose what to vote for in real time. This unique ability of Tau is the only decentralized solution to create a truly dynamic protocol.
An excerpt from http://www.idni.org/

Now you might think: Tau seems like a powerful tool but will it be too difficult to use for most people? There might be some learning curve involved for sure, and it'd be similar to learning a new language in the beginning. Those of us who learn to use it well enough to scale our discussions and collaborative works will likely gain a significant edge over those who are not using the platform. I'd imagine plenty of projects and communities around the world being able to overcome some of their obstacles in development through Tau. Hence, it may be fair to expect that market forces will gravitate towards the platform just like how we're all using the Internet these days.

Until the next post.

I've been thinking about Tau almost everyday for the past many months now, and I will admit that its deeper technicalities are still way out of my league, although I've made sure to word them broadly out the best I can. If you like what I do, please consider sharing this post and voting on my witness account on Steem. For more info, check out my recent witness announcement post.

As always, thanks for reading!
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I've been following this project for a while now and I truly believe the lead developer Ohad Asor is on a completely different level than any other expert I've come across. The word genius is tossed around very loosely in the tech industry, especially in the crypto space, but that man is something else entirely.

To the extent that I can follow his vision, I'm very impressed by it. And I believe he's one of the very few people on the planet who has the ability to implement this vision.

Tau is definitely worth having on your radar as it may prove to be an indispensable technology one day.

But don't take my word for it, ask him some difficult technical questions in maths, logic, cs, programming, crytpo yourself in his irc and judge him for yourself.

server: freenode
channel: ##idni
second channel: ##tau

What I'd really like to see how this all would look like in action - even a simple mockup could go far at this point for most of us as even with more posts getting written about this, it's just hard to imagine what the end product will look like and how it can be utilized.

there's a mock up of the demo on the website
http://www.idni.org/
I think the actual platform will be more intuitive, with the ability to add comments, pictures, links etc. along with making logical propositions

If I’m not mistaken, that may also just be one interface for the blockchain - whereas like Steem or any other blockchain, there may be any number of applications and distinct UI’s developed, no...?

yes, that mock up is merely just one example of an application under Tau

Tau is far more general and technically sophisticated than anything else out there. It's power arises from applying a decidable, self defining logic that allows subsequent blocks to be entirely defined by previous block accordingly to the real time specifications of its users.

Thanks, it seems the site has gone over total overhaul and looks polished now. The mock up also looks promising.

So many chains, so many hypes. Reality check, all these hypes and chains won't even last a year or two, let alone practical usability among people who just want to get shit done

Truth is, Google and Facebook have long been colonizing the entire Internet way before their decentralized counterparts could even figure out how to make their shit actually work

There are only two (2) greatest inventions on the Internet (and technology in general) namely: Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing

And who's leading the game? Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Amazon. Nothing new at all

Cyc is older than Google, Facebook, Amazon, but there are reasons why we aren't all using Cyc. The business model of Google, Facebook, Amazon, are the key.

The project looks like it is done in a waterfall model. The development travels in a linear progression where the next phase begins once the previous phase is complete (tml, alpha, beta, tau and agoras market). The advantage of this type of model is that it would provide quality, reliability and maintainability to the project. In contrast, it's a long walk for something tangible to appear. This would probably be the best development cycle choice category since the project is very complex and has a huge impact to humanity.

I see it more like if a project is extremely difficult to implement (has a high rate of failure at the implementation level) then the most critical phase where something can go wrong is right now (the code writing phase). What I mean is the reason TML is taking so long is because the project is so ambitious and there can be zero bugs in something as mission critical as the core of TML. So you are right it's about quality/reliability and maintainability.

It is also the fact that the theory behind what Ohad is doing is so complex that at this time no one can help him. So it's still at that immature stage where he's still figuring out how to code it himself and no one really knows his vision better than he does at this time. When it gets to a point where the most important components are coded then you will see other programmers begin to chip in and the speed of development accelerate.

This is not like Ethereum with Solidity. Some people believe Ethereum was a rushed design which was hacked together for speed of implementation. A deliberate approach also could have been taken with EOS which also had major flaws at launch. If you're going for provably secure, provably correct, decidable, etc, then yes it's now more complex.

A compiler alone could be easy. In fact if I were going to do it I honestly would have hacked something together from other projects which have compilers. But Ohad wants to do it all from scratch to meet his specific and precise criteria. Because nothing similar exists this means he has to research and learn while he's coding which seems to be why it takes a long time. He has to determine whether to go with bwd chaining or fwd chaining, or why pfp is the only suitable logic and what the consequences to the design will be because of this.

I agree almost completely but there are alot of good technologies in the crypto but they are all hidden by the fact that there are so many of them out there. If I am someone who wants to get into these then I either have to be in the crypto industry looking for certain things or just so happen to know someone who is or wait a decade or two. This imo what bottlenecks all of these great new techs coming up.

If you have free time, look into it and go over everything you can find. Even the IRC logs. Take a week or two, or more like a few months like I did. I'd say that it's worth it.

"any effective means of discussing and collaborating without being all over the place"

Does this mean Tau will call me out on straw-manning people by repeating their arguments slightly wrongly, then debating the wrong words I just put in their mouth!?

Does this mean the end of "what abouting" people, where I don't even bother addressing their points, but just accuse some other person of being worse than whoever they are complaining about?

Oh no, my world is crumbling. :(

Seriously though, this sounds like absolute genius. Any technology that can speed the reaching of points of consensus frees up so much time to reach consensus on what's left. The human race really stands to benefit from this, even if I will lose a lot more arguments lol!

I think it might turn out to be a surprisingly fun tool.. will see!

seems with tau we back to the old greece debating about everything.

On a lighter side...Tau in India is referred to the elder uncle...i.e the big brother of your father.

Looking at the in depth analysis..i would assume its going to be the top most thing in crypto world....as in Tau of crypto world the big uncle...😉

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I've heard so much about Tauchain (even though my understanding is still limited) from respected steemians here that I will be greatly disappointed if it does not live up to that potential

I see it as a collaborative platform built on AI where World problems in various spheres can quickly be linked to solutions in various spheres. That is pretty revolutionary if done successfully.

It will live up to the potential or not depending on the quality of the initial community. Join with us if you want to help tilt the odds in favor of success.

Investing in the tokens seems to be the most direct and effective way of showing support to the project. I've been eyeing on the Agora since it was delisted from the last exchange and cannot find a reliable source of getting some for a few months.

Maybe you should share more info on this matter as well?

It's right on this decentralized exchange: https://openledger.io/market/AGRS_BTC

Just because CoinMarketCap will not list it for whatever political reason it doesn't mean it's not on any exchange.

One would hope that more than a single, relatively low liquidity, exchange would make a market for the token. Not too many people would mistake the current situation as a positive sign for future price potential, myself included.

That is why I said nothing about future price potential. These days I say if you want to support the development of Tauchain/Agoras then buy the token. If you are hoping the price of the token will reach some target as part of speculation then maybe this is not the best time to consider buying the token.

I don't blame anyone who decides to wait until it's listed on more exchanges with greater liquidity. If you're buying the token for these two reasons I will list then I encourage you to go for it:

  • You want to support the continued development of Tauchain/Agoras (the token pays for development indirectly).
  • You want to buy the token because you believe the project if successful will make the token useful for what you want to do (science, trading stocks, developing apps, etc).

If you're in the first group then you have no reason to care what the token costs because it supports development. I admit this perspective is probably rare.

If you're in the second group and you believe Ohad will be able to pull it off then buying the token at this price is like buying Ethereum at 50 cents or Bitcoin under $1. If you think Agoras will be able to allow for the building of apps which no other network and technology will allow then of course the token which powers those apps will have value. Similar proposition to EOS in a way.

Depending on what apps you decide to develop over Tau it should be easy to create an app which can generate far more profit than whatever you paid for the tokens. It is true at some point more people will have to trade the token but the demand for the token will be created only if there are exclusive apps which can't be built on any other platform.

Considering how Tauchain will work no other platform will even come close to having similar capabilities. So if you're a researcher, or a trader, and you have access to a platform to give you a competitive advantage (saves time and money for you) then you can win by getting the tokens now while it's at potentially it's cheapest. Once your competitors find out about Agoras they too will want to use it and you'll already have all the tokens you'll ever need.

If you're in the second group and you believe Ohad will be able to pull it off then buying the token at this price is like buying Ethereum at 50 cents or Bitcoin under $1. If you think Agoras will be able to allow for the building of apps which no other network and technology will allow then of course the token which powers those apps will have value.

I've always been one to put a small percentage of my profits into high reward stocks/ cryptos/what-have-you with at least one good selling point (preferably many). That said, what Tauchain is offering, in terms of being able to invest into the product, is weak and, frankly, pathetic.

I agree that the concept behind Tauchain is something worthy of getting excited about. I AM intrigued by the project. But, dayum, does Ohad care even a little bit about investor awareness...like, at all? Because if he does, he's inept at branding and investor relations, to put it lightly.

I want to see some signs that the man both cares about its success and has a bit of what it takes to build up some positive momentum. Seeing the token on one measly decentralized exchange (something that 99 out of 100 crypto traders/ investors wouldn't even consider touching) isn't it, it isn't enough. IMO, the odds of building any type of momentum worth speaking of are very, very low as it stands; as in, not even worth a "lotto" play on it - THAT bad!

What would be a good sign for me is that he's willing to put down a little bet that he has something worthy of our attention, by paying a few noteworthy crypto exchanges enough to get his token listed on their platform(s).

MVP in my opinion should come first. Investor relations requires MVP. Otherwise what are you investing in?

An idea (concept). I'm just speaking to your comment about getting in because you believe in Ohad's vision and capabilities.

I agree that it's attractive to get in at the ground floor, but only if the floor has at least a few squares to it.

Get in where you fit in. It is entirely up to you. I trust in Ohad's competence after communicating with him over years. If I'm wrong then I'm wrong but to get rewarded you must take a risk. In general, if Tauchain can be created I'll have to use it because of the competitive advantages it can offer those using it.

And those competitive advantages will form the basis of value behind the token. If you simply can't do it on any other platform then you have to buy the token.

Intriguing proposal! Some of the most intriguing things that might be learned from Tau aren't how it works, but how - and who - work to corrupt it.

If it does work well, the opposition to rational discourse it engenders will be legendary.

Thanks!

Excellent write up - and we loved the mix at the end. This reminds me of a blockchainified LOOMIO - I will read the whitepaper in the next car-ride and get back to you.

Hey thanks! Oh there's an old whitepaper, the new one's being worked on and only after demo. One of those uncommon dev cycles :)

Fascinating. I love what they're saying, and can easily conceive of how it might work... but I haven't the faintest idea of how seamlessly it could be integrated into how we communicate, and can imagine all kinds of pitfalls if people got excited about the potential and began relying on it before the kinks had been worked out. I can also imagine that humans are different than I think they are, and that scares me. Someone is right and someone is wrong about what humans are like generally, and if they're actually meanies that are going to decide to do things that oppress others, I really hope they don't have the tools to see how many of them there are.

But that's not a real fear that should hold us back from something like this.

I am cautiously optimistic about this project.

The innovation is really Tau Meta Language, which is a specific class of logic that is decidable, self-referential, and supports negation - the 3 characteristics of a definitive language of law. With this we can scale discussions, collaborate, and store and synthesize knowledge and software, etc, since Tau is essentially a blockchain that only stores the rules of the network and the rules of changing the rules. Do drop by the IRC and Telegram channels if you have more questions!

Logic based AI will never deliver what is promised here, way too limited. This reminds me of the AI expert systems of 30 years ago with an extra meta level. It sounds nice but it will become utterly complex, think of the amendments on the amendments of e.g. law. He thinks he can avoid that by encapsulating semantics and wants us to speak in that encapsulated language. No, honestly, I am not convinced of this project. The only thing I really like is using block chain technology to grow a kind of brain, great application of the tech but waiting on better implementation of it.

I didn't know you are running a witness node, will try to remember it next time I open vessel, which position are you more or less?

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Logic based AI will never deliver what is promised here, way too limited.

Logic based AI is already in use! If others have a demand for it already then why would it somehow not work here? I would love to have access to expert systems and super computers like what governments can use to help me improve my decision making.

Here is an example of what logic based AI (the same kind empowering Tauchain) can do:

Compliance is a huge problem in the crypto space. Imagine how much time and money can be saved if these functions are automated?

Value is produced if a product can save time for the users. That is all Tauchain will have to do to be useful to me. If it can allow me to do more in less time then it has saved me time and the Agoras token has value.

And logic based AI can do that better than pattern recognizing AI. For decision making pattern recognition AI is very limited compared to logic.

Hi, I was in AI myself as well about 10 years ago for a short while, but that was machine-learning/pattern-reg. I didn't know much about symbolic AI until last year and still don't know much about it at all. Anyway, I think you should check out more about what the project is up to, Ohad has put a lot of thought into it and it'll be great to have more people asking the hard questions. As for your concerns about amendments on amendments, check out this blogpost: http://www.idni.org/blog/the-art-of-self-reference.html

Thanks for considering btw! I think I'm at about #60 at the moment.

Babel?

The Internet of Languages
There is no single best language for all purposes, which is the reason we're building the Tau Meta Language (TML): a language intended to define other languages and translate between them while maintaining the same information. TML allows seamless communication and semantic translation between programming languages, knowledge representation languages, visualization and organization formats, domain-specific languages, and more.

Hmm as far as I understand, it's through connecting languages so there's no one universal tower, or language.

You're right. 😊@KevinWong

Now the whole earth [a]spoke one language and used the same words (vocabulary)........
9 Therefore the name of the city was [b]Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth; and from that place the Lord scattered and dispersed them over the surface of all the earth.
Genesis 11:1.

from the logs:-

10:09 < naturalog> 1. the is no universal lang
10:09 < naturalog> 2. so we come up with a metalang
10:09 < naturalog> 3. but that's back to 1
10:10 < naturalog> 4. so the metalang need to be able to redefine itself

Yup, which is why the metalanguage is based on a certain kind of logic that is decidable and is self-defining.