Tau 🤝 Token Engineering Commons

[JME]

Hi, everyone. I’m Jamie. I want to introduce myself and the team building Tau. I stumbled onto @gideonro and @Tamara’s posts recently and was excited to see we share a kindred mission. Many thanks to Mount_Manu for kindly onboarded me and recommending I post here.

What is Tau?

Tau is a universe built from your thoughts, advice, and knowledge. It is the first-ever decentralized blockchain social network able to take the consensus of its users and update its own code in real-time to give all users control over what the software does for them and how it evolves at any scale. Get ready for a world where you, with billions of people, can combine your brainpower and create the universe you want to live in. Tau is the ultimate DAO.

On Tau, your thoughts influence how the system evolves, your voice is always heard among billions, and your knowledge is the most valuable asset. Tau will give you the power to understand the intended meaning behind the knowledge, thoughts, and advice shared over the network and thus will be able to engage in real-time discussions with billions of people at once. You will instantly see any agreement or difference in thinking between you and others or between other people, and the reasons why.

Tau’s innovative advances are powered by its new generation Logical AI-based engine. Unlike machine learning AI, it can accurately understand the very meaning behind the ideas that you express and self-update its own code. Hence, it becomes whatever you, the users, collaboratively decide it should be. Tau is the most efficient way of connecting your Worldview, the real, digital you – in the form of your knowledge, nuanced thoughts, advice, and digital assets to billions of people with maximum collaborative effect.

On Tau, your profile will be your Worldview. It is your personal world at the center of Tau, created and owned solely by you, made from your knowledge, thoughts, and advice. It is a digital version of yourself that will represent everything you know, believe in, and are curious about. Your Worldview is entirely yours to own. You can choose to share aspects of it with other people, publicly or privately, and connect it with apps, services, and businesses. The consensus of everyone’s Worldviews will define the next version of Tau, bringing you the ability to create a new digital universe that you all control.

Who are the team?

The team behind Tau and Agoras are world-class scientists and experts, passionate about advancing our world and building a better society with knowledge at its core. Team | TAU

Tau’s Founder is Ohad Asor. He’s been a Software Developer and Mathematician at top tech companies since 1995. He was the youngest university student in Israel, studying Mathematics and Computer Science at the age of 13. Over the years, he has accumulated extensive knowledge and experience in programming and various areas of math, with a focus on logic, machine learning, complexity theory, philosophy of science, economics, social choice, and decentralized networks. He designed and implementing Tau and Agoras. As the founder, he is currently leading the development of the project. Work history: Logician and Mathematician, an expert in AI, prior work with GE Healthcare developing software systems.

DAOs: Where Are They Going?

Compared to $6B in late June last year, nearly $14B worth of digital assets are held in the top 20 DAOs. With DAO membership quintupling since June, there are over 978,000 DAO members across crypto, and it continues to grow.

Tau solves the severe problems that plague current DAOs:

Centralization: Controlled by the founding team and a small group of investors.

Unsatisfactory blockchain governance. Using voting and or hierarchies.

Rigid blockchain design

Non-developers can’t change code, and developers have limited capabilities to change the software.

Security risks

Computers don’t understand humans

No serious economy should be controlled by a centralized group of developers. Nevertheless, the core development of today’s blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, is primarily being executed by a small circle of developers. No current blockchain is able to implement users’ wants and needs in real-time. On Tau, users will govern the development of the system by simply expressing their opinions on how the system should function. Even implicit opinions, stored in user Worldview, will be taken into account. The system will then calculate the consensus amongst the users and implement the next version of Tau into the next block in the blockchain, without the need to hard fork. Moreover, Tau’s blockchain will be capable of reasoning, outcome prediction, collaborative development, and Proof of Execution.

How Does Tau Do This?

Tau uses Logical AI at its core. Unlike machine learning, Logical AI provides provably correct results and can capture real-world semantic knowledge. You can use Tau’s logic-based engine for its ability to accurately self-build complex software from knowledge input. You simply specify how any aspect of Tau should function, including its blockchain, and Tau rewrites its own code to provably meet your specifications.

Logical AI vs. Machine learning: Machine learning AI is unsuitable for accurately building any serious software because it always has a probability of its outcome being incorrect. It can’t show you the reason why it made the decisions or prove that its results are correct. Meanwhile, Logical AI is capable of machine learning and can explain its decision process to you, which is a massive advancement over the machine learning type of AI. Thanks to Logical AI, users will be able to give Tau global instructions such as “do not send private data over the network,” and they will affect the entire codebase.

Tau understands all ever-changing Worldviews in the network, including yours and billions of other people’s, so you never have to explicitly vote; your Worldview is your vote. This makes Tau the only decentralized solution to create a truly dynamic protocol suitable for humanity-wide governance.

Turing Complete programming languages are very expressive but lack decidability, which is essential for Tau. The inability to arrive conclusively at a true or false answer over every expressible query (decidability) is precisely one of the biggest threats to the security of other blockchain projects. A decidable language is essential when dealing with code that serves as law and governance: otherwise, it’ll be inconsistent or incorrect. It also allows us to write the blockchain rules without fear of unforeseen outcomes.

Tau’s Meta Language (TML) possesses three key features: decidability, self-definition, and unstratified Negation. It is relatively trivial to have some of these features independently. For example, it’s simple for a Turing Complete (non-decidable) language to support self-definition.

TML begins with the fundamental idea that you can’t have an ideal language for everything, which is why we have a meta-language that can define itself, which allows it to evolve with Decidability, Self-definition, and Negation.

We’ll be able to define and translate all sorts of languages for all kinds of purposes. We envision that this tech will allow scaling of productive discussion without limitation for the first time in human history. Imagine if a discussion among 1000x TEC members is 200x more productive than a discussion among five experts. How much would this shape the world?

Why aren’t other projects doing this already?

Tau’s design is brilliant and the engineering required to make it a reality is difficult and complex. Lead developer and founder Ohad has researched for 5+ years to devise a solid and complete solution. After extensively studying Boolean Algebras, Ohad made a groundbreaking discovery allowing you to take any logic and enhance it with the ability to speak about its own formulas. Logicians have generally considered such an ability impossible until now. Furthermore, if the original logic is decidable, the extended logic is also decidable. This is a monumental step, a historic level discovery in which, for the decidability part, Ohad had to solve a century-old problem for the theory of boolean algebra, effective quantifier elimination.

What traction has Tau made?

Tau’s Meta Language (TML) can do something critical that other programming languages cannot (support Negation while remaining decidable and self-defining); its outperforming them in terms of benchmarks (github(dot)com/tomasklapka/tml_benchmarking) especially when datasets are too big to fit ordinary implementations. The TML code (github(dot)com/IDNI/TML) is also many orders of magnitudes more succinct.

TML is faster than the languages developed by multiple billion-dollar companies specializing in this area. For example, Oracle, who made Souffle, is worth almost $200B. The performance increases are not minor: in some cases they are approx 3x over the best implementations of (the far more limited versions) of Datalog).

TML also has the first generic parser for context-free grammar. It takes a grammar and input string and returns all parse trees, no questions asked!

A huge theoretical advancement of identifying and formulating the problem of the law of changing the laws has been made. It’s been made in the scope of logical AI and not just in the case of law. For example, if you want to make a software update to your robot, you plug a USB stick in it with the new software. You want the robot to accept the update only if it admits Asimov’s three laws of robotics. This problem hasn’t been considered and formulated before, and it had no solution, even if it was. Tau’s boolean algebraic solution is the first-ever of it’s kind. Both the question and the solution are very novel.

When Tau?

Tau’s Meta Language can be explored in our TML playground - tml.idni(dot)org, optimized for a planned 1.0 release in Q1 2023.

Tau’s Test net is planned for the end of 2022 with mainnet following in Q1 2023

The team with the lead developer and founder Ohad are dedicated to Tau’s development with monthly AMAs, development, and continued Github updates

What do experts think about Tau?

Prof. C. Benzmüller, Head of Berlin University

“The Tau project is fascinating and visionary.”

Prof. E. Franconi, Founder of KRDB Research Center

“I find the vision on Tau revolutionary and game-changing.”

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We’d love to partner with the TEC, be a part of the community, and welcome you all to the early discussions about Tau.

Tau’s Socials

[gene]

Hi @JME! Thanks for this introduction to your project! I had a couple of small questions. I’m sure you probably have the answers in a FAQ somewhere but thought it might be nice to have them addressed here if possible. =)

1. Are there any sybil defense measures built into Tau?
2. How is the system capable of accounting for non-literalities ie tongue-in-cheek statements that aren’t necessarily direct or implicit?
3. If there are no votes, what are the questions the system will be utilizing to provide hypothetical outcomes to, and within what time bounds? If that is just no questions, and real-time, what does that even look like? What would be a hypothetical change scenario?

Lastly, does Ohad have any academic papers published on these topics, particularly for the novel solutions to standing problems you mentioned?

Thanks again for this great presentation on Tau! =)

[JME]

Greetings @gene ! Thanks for the great questions.

1. Are there any Sybil defense measures built into Tau?
Ohad wants to involve notaries so that users can verify their identity via a notary. Simultaneously, there will be a trust system where users can vouch for others.

Concerning how Tau deals with false, fake or untrue data, Ohad doesn’t anticipate the risk to be high as there’s no notion of ‘truth’ in the network. “If someone wants to believe 1+1=3, they can write so. No one can prevent them from doing so, and very few will agree with them. It will not affect anyone else as it’s only your own opinion. If people post statements you find false, unfounded, or misleading. You can disagree with them. There is no inherent truth in the system, merely opinions.”

Prof. Franconi: “There are recent interests in informal studies about fact-checking. If you want to check whether something is true or not, you have to have a notion of truth. So that’s why logic would be crucial to approach this problem. You have to have a lot of knowledge: conceptual schema and data, the laws to change the laws, and all these facts. There are interesting recent works in the database world where they can do fact-checking of the description of objects. And by using statistics, and mainly using the semantics behind it. In the area you want to fact check, you want to describe the meanings of the values, relevant things, how they are interrelated, etc. So a number of things about specific facts. It’s expressed nowadays as a knowledge graph, but it’s really about a logical theory. So you write statements or laws in a formal language, and then you can use statistics related to facts and do fact-checking.”

2. How is the system capable of accounting for non-literalities ie tongue-in-cheek statements that aren’t necessarily direct or implicit?

Sarcasm is in the same class as jokes, Metaphors. etc. Meaning you say something, but you mean something else. Apart from the fact that there are many studies about how to solve these issues, we can, in a very informal way, generalize these studies by saying you have to consider the context of the act of communication. Generally speaking, the context adds meaning, and all the theories to understand what you really want to tell me capture these things. This topic has been a part of Prof. Franconi’s Logical AI research for a long time. In the last 10 years, it’s been overlooked by most in the AI field, where everything has been about Neural networks. Neural networks can only understand literal sequences of words; they don’t have any theory about the context of the dialogue, what other people know, the cultural effects, and the non-verbal cues.

3. If there are no votes, what are the questions the system will be utilizing to provide hypothetical outcomes to, and within what time bounds? If that is just no questions and real-time, what does that even look like? What would be a hypothetical change scenario?

If I understand you correctly, people post their opinions with or without questions. Tau accelerates the process of collective decision-making; the rules of consensus themselves are determined through consensus, which can vary from group to group (aside from the rules governing the network itself). A hypothetical change scenario could be users installing ‘philosopher kings’ E.g., certain accounts have dictatorial or veto rights. Or a combination of specific accounts. Users could have stake-weighted opinions. So everyone is free to have a say, and what they say is automatically picked up, but their weight is based on their stake or any other basis we choose.
Users could have any combination of any ruleset they can think of. Different rule sets for changing certain existing rules (e.g., more difficult thresholds to alter maximum $AGRS supply than, say, adjust max block size). Each group can have its combination of consensus rulesets. Because it’s a logic-based system, users can probably have some pretty sophisticated rules. Maybe something like “I support all changes to the core code that’s functionally equivalent to existing code but increases performance. Then I will always vote for more efficient code and will never have to express this opinion again.” (it might not be mathematically possible to calculate code equivalence in acceptable time etc., but just an example)

Lastly, does Ohad have any academic papers published on these topics, particularly for the novel solutions to standing problems you mentioned?

There is Ohad’s whitepaper. This is a good overview. What won’t be covered is Ohad’s recent breakthroughs in 2022 specifically about software specification.

We plan to initially submit on the topic of Tau’s Meta Language (TML) planned for launch next quarter. We are presenting it to the scientific community in a well-planned series of papers that go through the usual publication channels and meet work requirements in formal languages. I’ll keep you posted!