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


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

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

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


 
Q&A:

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

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


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

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


Q: Is Ohad working on this project full time?

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project: www.IDNI.org
Whitepaper: https://www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf


To grow our community locally on a global scale, we are looking for motivated community managers in Japan.

You are the right person if:

You are familiar with the culture of the general crypto user and associated demographics.
You have experience in moderating, posting on and advertising on social media platforms.
You have content creation experience from blogs, to posts.
You understand how to grow a Telegram community to 1000+ actively engaged users.
You understand how to have meaningful interactions with community members.

If this sounds interesting to you, we'd be very happy to hear from you. Please send your letter of motivation, CV and any references to previous work of yours to kilian [at] idni [dot] org.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Project: www.IDNI.org
Whitepaper: https://www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf


To grow our community locally on a global scale, we are looking for motivated community managers in Korea.

You are the right person if:

You are familiar with the culture of the general crypto user and associated demographics.
You have experience in moderating, posting on and advertising on social media platforms.
You have content creation experience from blogs, to posts.
You understand how to grow a Telegram community to 1000+ actively engaged users.
You understand how to have meaningful interactions with community members.

If this sounds interesting to you, we'd be very happy to hear from you. Please send your letter of motivation, CV and any references to previous work of yours to kilian [at] idni [dot] org.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Project: www.IDNI.org
Whitepaper: https://www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf


To grow our community locally on a global scale, we are looking for motivated community managers in various countries.

You are the right person if:

You are familiar with the culture of the general crypto user and associated demographics.
You have experience in moderating, posting on and advertising on social media platforms.
You have content creation experience from blogs, to posts.
You understand how to grow a Telegram community to 1000+ actively engaged users.
You understand how to have meaningful interactions with community members.

If this sounds interesting to you, we'd be very happy to hear from you. Please send your letter of motivation, CV and any references to previous work of yours to kilian [at] idni [dot] org.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Hi!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aggregation of US based media outlets & reporters in the sectors of technology, software & internet. Also done some outreach towards influencers & been more active on Twitter, establishing a continuous posting schedule. Also done aggregation of various relevant Subreddits to do postings there. The most interaction we got from the Singularity Subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/ixjk4f/discussion_a_new_approach_towards_achieving/). Also published the Chinese Bitcointalk-Thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5277726.0). Conversations with community members. Feedback has been to switch to ERC20 for benefits such as stronger liquidity in connection with Ethereum based applications such as Uniswap. Created an executive summary as a one pager to be easily shared by ourselves and the community among cryptocurrency investors. Ohad is going to rephrase certain parts of it and then it will be ready for sharing. Been looking for conferences on KRR & Logic from February 2020 on but couldn’t find any specific virtual ones. So if you as a community member know of one, let us know as we definitely are interested in being a part of it. We also established the AGRS Rewards Pool serving as a fast ramp to reward community participation. By that, we now have a monthly reservoir of AGRS to rewards proactive community engagement. We are looking for of participation in ways that people bring us community growth (e.g. by writing a blog post, getting us coverage in relevant media outlets, by introducing someone big to the project, creating developer tools or documentation or by doing community support. All these kinds of work are applicable for possibly getting rewarded. We value impact and quality as metrics (Such as a high quality blog post that gets shared a lot). Along with this program, we now also select the most dedicated Community Member of the Month and reward him/her with a total 100 AGRS. The winning community member of September is Dana Edwards who published an update about Tau as a blog post on Steem (https://steemit.com/tauchain/@dana-edwards/tau-update-first-order-logic-parser-and-other-good-news) and who also has been very active in our Telegram community – congratulations!

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

Q&A:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, will be in touch.

Also, still open for more applications. Thanks.

新版Tau
社会选择（Social Choice）这个流程对新版Tau来说很重要。社会选择是一个团体（少到几个人，多到千万人）不断重复协商地达成并遵守协议的流程。这其中涉及五个方面：语言（language），知识（knowledge），讨论（discussion），合作（collaboration）以及对选择做出的抉择（choice about choice）。提出一种社会选择的机制，都需要仔细考虑这五个方面。
这种协同决策的主要问题在于对于信息的处理和分流有一定规模的限制。通常这些限制在现实中被认为是不可能克服的。比如，对我们来说，每个人都有权利投票是一件很自然的事，但是有没有考虑过，如果每个人都有以平等的权利来提出投票的具体内容，会是怎样一种情形呢?
日常生活，在比较小规模的群体中，我们通常不需要通过投票就可以表达，讨论我们各自的观点，根据情况对于这些观点达成共识或者分歧。但是讨论群体规模增加，比如大到一个国家，我们只能想到的是，每个人有权利给有限的提议投票。这些有限的提议是通过阶层式（hierarchical）（而非去中心式）的流程选出来，理想的情况是，每个人都有权利来提出这些提议。但是在这样的阶层式流程下，通过一层又一层，达到人们投票阶段时，大部分原始采集到的观点已经丢失不复存在。正是这样，我们根本没有想过如果有办法让每个人有同等的权利提出提议和投票。确实，怎样才能让一个投票人每天过目无数同等权重的提议呢？
现存所有的讨论方式无一避免，都存在扩展性差的弱点。在参与讨论人数很少情况下，人数加倍也不会带来信息增倍，当参与人数太大（可能只是几十个人）时，参与人数加倍甚至会导致信息量不但不增，反倒事倍功半。
根据合作化决策和协作理论，基于某些假设条件下，我们是可以达成真正可扩展的讨论和信息流，就是10000人比100人有效率100倍。但是，要达成这个目标，我们要借助机器的帮助，同时我们也需要帮助指导机器，从而帮助我们自己，。
确切来说，要让计算机理解我们在讨论中所说的，我们可能不得不使用一个特定的，跟着时间不断进化的语言。既然没有人知道如何让计算机理解人类自然语言，那我们必须求助于机器，使用可以让机器理解的语言。这点我们一会再详细展开。首先让我们聊聊关于自我修正（self-amendment）。
那么Tau Chain, 也就是我们所说的去中心化计算机网络，能支持哪些社会选择呢？计算机最擅长的是运行程序，通过Tau Chain我们可以收集知识，我们可以同意或反对这些知识；我们的讨论会以可执行的操作通过Tau这个平台执行。这些操作也不过是计算机程序，而且在这其中最重要的程序，就是Tau平台本身。
在Tauchain系统里协作决策的主要决定，也是关于Tau本身的。Tau是对于关于Tau的讨论。或者更详尽一些又简练地给它定义就是：
Tau是X生成Y，被Y所取代的情形。（Consider a process, denoted by X, of people, forming and following another process denoted by Y. Tau is the case where X=Y）
这就是Tau。Tau是什么不重要，重要的是它可以变成任何我们想要的。再有，我们可以把Tau看成一种计算机程序，这个程序可以根据用户的共同决策，对程序自身做出改变。
需要注意的是，Tau不是用来猜测人们的观点，甚至都不是像机器学习那样进行非常有依据的猜测。这可能是我们会运用逻辑（logic）的原因。通过Tau平台输入说出的语言和计算机程序一样是形式化和确定性的（formal and definite），但Tau处理的是一般知识而不是机器指令。
通过协作自我修正，某个程序可以转化为任何我们想要的一个或者同时多个程序。事实上Tau不仅仅关于Tau本身自我修正，而是运用于任何其他个人的或协作式的活动，比如，进行小型的和非常大规模的知识讨论，分享和安排，Tau的计算机程序可以探测和协调讨论中的共识和分歧。
本文开头对应于Tau开发路线图提到社会选择的五个方面。接下来会侧重解释这部分，这里先做简短摘要。第一步是安装启用Tau元语言TML（Tau Meta Language）以及语言互联网（the internet of languages）。第二步是Alpha平台也是一个讨论平台。接下来Beta平台关于后续合作决策流程（不只是定义知识），更确切的说是不仅仅定义知识，更重要的是执行程序。这时的Alpha和Beta的基础结构并不是像比特币一样完全去中心化的。有了Alpha和Beta，接下来才是开发去中心的自我修正社会选择平台（self-amending social choice platform），也就是Tau。除此以外，我们也会有Agoras， Agoras有三个部分：知识市场；类似Zannet的计算机资源市场；以及新设计的无风险不用印钞的经济衍生品交易市场。
为了让机器更好的促进人们的讨论和合作能力，机器需要能够理解我们所说的语言。机器语言和人类语言不一样，目前没有人可以让机器使用人类语言，而让人类直接用机器语言也不容易，机器语言和人类日常知识交换的交流方式不相通。机器语言由机器指令组成，而人类对知识描绘是不同的性质。换句话讲，机器需要可操作的信息，而人类运用的是陈述语言。因此Tau的目标之一就是让人类专注于定义 “是什么” （"know-what"），而让机器专注于 “如何去执行” （"know-how"） 。
因此，逻辑将会是搭起人类语言和机器语言之前的桥梁，这个概念之前也被广泛提出(cf. e.g. the article "Knowledge Representation and Classical Logic" by Lifschitz et al) 。形式逻辑对人类来说比较自然，机器也可以使用。但是 “形式逻辑” 并不是特定针对某一语言，而只是对于一个语系的模糊的描述。
单一的通用语言被认为是不可能存在的。但如果有一种可以定义所有新语言的元语言（meta-language），其实我们也不需要某个理想的语言来迎合所有（即使是最基本的）需求。我们提出的这种通用（元）语言可以回到原点，重新开始定义其他任何语言。这个元语言需要能够重新自我定义并自我修正。这样我们获得的不仅仅是新的语言，也是一种自我修正的语言，拥有这个语言这对于自我修正系统来说极其重要。
事实上，拥有自我定义和可判定性这样良好逻辑属性的逻辑并不常见。很难找到比我们现有通用图灵机表达性（expressive）更少，内容性比如可判定性（informative, e.g. decidable）更多的语言。我们采用的logic PFP的表达属性符合PSPACE-complete（参考关于Finite Model Theory的书籍），PFP可以对自身定义，参考Imhof, 1999 "Logics that define their own semantics"。
继续说到语言互联网（the Internet of Languages）。我们把上面提到的元语言叫做TML（Tau Meta-Language，在Github可以了解更多），用户用TML通过描述不同语言下的两个文件在不同条件下有的同样含义，从而定义逻辑公式，来定义新语言。换句话说，要定义一个新语言，需要定义一种保证已存在语言保留语义的翻译方法。这里范畴的语义是指本体论（ontological）（物体和关系），不是在计算机程序的可操作性语义（operational semantics）。这样我们获得一个知识表示语言（knowledge representation languages）互联网，不管使用哪种语言，都可以通过TML将这个语言的文档转化成不同语言。
 
这里说的翻译不是指把法语翻译成中文，文章前面已经强调我们处理的不是自然语言。当然理论上来说，也许未来有人可以通过TML编写完全可以理解自然语言的程序，但是我们并不指望这个。事实上，自然语言有很多形式是非常接近于完整的语言，对人们来说很容易上手（比如“机器都可以理解的简单英文”），所以我们希望TML可以处理人类在一定程度可以理解的语言，但是设计TML主要意图是机器语言。打个比方，如果想要把一个文件转换成HTML格式或者维基格式；或是将高级语言下的程序转换成机器代码；或是根据逻辑编写代码。
一般来说，TML旨在成为一种编译器的编译程序。我们采取了部分求值的方法（Partial Evaluation），让这个编译器编译程序更加有效的运作，而不是每一次编译同一语言的文档都需要不断考虑这个语言的逻辑。部分求值的方法也带来另外一个对给编译器编译程序而言很理想的特点：二村映射（Futamura projections）形式。
既然我们可以用不同语言表达知识和观点，更确切来说这些不同的语言也是用户通过语言互联网不断定义的。我们用这些语言交流的时候，是人与人的交流，更确切其实是人-机-人的交流。在对话中，机器并不是跟人平起平坐，机器只是机器，因为我们把信息编码成机器可以理解的形式，所以机器可以组织我们的语言。这样一个人就可以用把想法传播给另一个人，我们可以从传播一个信息这样的范畴，已经可以体会三个好处：解释起来便捷，容易理解，同时把知识形式化（formalizing）。
具体来说，用户只需要向机器解释，不需要向另一个用户解释。在某些方面这样做是更简单的，其他方面这样会更复杂。但机器跟人相比不那么受机构和规模的限制。一旦将一个想法转化成机器理解的形式，下一个用户不但可以把它翻译成其他的知识表示语言，还可以组织成新的想法（也是以机器可理解的形式）。用户可以像机器提问一切问题，因为机器可以完全理解这些问题，这里说的理解指的是理论上回答这些问题（又要提到可判定性）。机器可以帮助用户理解，机器不需要查阅提到这个想法的原作者，就可以回答所有人的问题。
但是Alpha可以做的超过上述情形。Alpha是没有规模限制的讨论平台，类似论坛或者社交网络，用户在个人页面或者团队页面上发帖和评论，个人页面主要是用户发布个人观点，并分享给社交圈。团队（team）由一些用户创建，用来发布某些主题的内容。比如，某个团队可以合作开发一个软件产品，撰写合同法规，或者只是一些科学、哲学，社会甚至没有特别意义的想法。
到这里为止，Alpha听起来跟其他讨论平台没有两样，但是因为运用了机器可以理解的语言，让我们多了很多优势。列举其中一些，自动检测同一个人说的重复观点，收集一次讨论中每个人所说的，把所有同意和反对的点列表出来。或者列出同意某个观点的所有人（而非每个发言人的所有观点）。也可以把讨论的信息用类似维基（wiki）这样更有条理更可读的形式组织出来。如果你看到有人对某个主题表达了跟你之前表达过的相同的观点，就甚至可以自动评论。你就可以点击“自动评论” ，系统会根据你之前就该主题的发言，在这个帖子里自动发表你的观点。更重要的可能是，可以在一定范围（可以是整个网络，一个团队，或者你的社交圈，一个项目等）计算出每个人都同意的那些说法。需要提到的是，这并不是什么魔法，一旦所有的讨论都写成逻辑，或者假设有一种逻辑，可以把任何东西转化成逻辑，这个也就是TML定义的文档的语言。
在Alpha，我们可以将非常多的知识教给某个网络，有意的或者在讨论中得到的附加产品。也可以建立所有人都同意和做贡献的理论。这些知识对我们来说有什么用呢？在计算机世界中，最终我们所能做的不过是运行计算机程序。在Beta平台上，我们将可讨论并实际运行这些程序。以Tau上，我们有一个特别团队叫Tau，每当团队做出一个新的决策，Tau的代码会自动修正。我们可以将我们在Alpha上讨论同意的通过Beta实现运行。一旦团队同意对某个程序的某方面修正，并不需要写或者重写任何代码，因为这都是自动实现的，所有代码都已经是机器可理解的语言。设计规范自动编写代码也只需要通过语言互联网对语言进行翻译，当然了，实现这一切，我们需要开发足够的语言转换器。举一个例子，MSO+λY中的自动编写代码是这个领域的前沿技术，是这个说来容易做起来难，而且技术含量很高。
对某个选择做出的选择是选择如何做选择。能够改变选择机制本身，换句话说，改变规则的规则， Tau代码随着时间演化。这本身会变成一种悖论，也可能为逻辑设限。如果规则可以自己改变，那一旦规则改变，不可避免自相矛盾。如何才能用不相悖的方式正式化这个流程呢？有人可能误认为高阶逻辑可以给规则定义规则，或者决定作出的选择，但是这并不足够。例如考虑这个规则“所以规则，包括这个规则，只能大多数人同意才可以修正。” 这个规则对它本身也奏效，所以不是有限阶。所以我们需要递归来处理这个改变规则的规则。这是我们在TML中采用定点（fixed-point）逻辑的重要方面。Beta中用到的 λY积分的重要内容（正如Bauer在"On Self-Interpreters For System-T and Other Typed λ-Calculi"中阐述的），一种语言必须有定点（fixed point）才可能自我解释，这就把目前所有的编程语言都排除了。
旧版Tau中考虑使用的更改规则的方法是Nomic方法，它跟新版Tau采用的方式有什么不同呢，举个例子，代表交易的双方的两个律师，试图达成双方都同意的协议。通常流程如下：第一个律师建议起草一个条款，第二个律师同意或反对，如果同意，附加此条款，反则不附加。然后由第二个律师提出条款，以此类推。这是Nomic方法。在Tau上同样的流程会变成，随着时间不断为程序加补丁。这样做会把首先加入的条款摆在不对称（asymmetry）的位置，对于这个不对称，以及Tau如何可以几乎完全解决这个问题，其实还可以说很多，首先试想新提出的条款与某个已有条款产生矛盾，如果我们不希望把优先权给最先加入的条款，那么需要对新的旧的甚至更多条款进行修正，而不是默认删除旧条款。
另一种方法是每个律师在每一轮都递交完整的合同草案，另一个律师要么完全同意，要么重新起草完全不同的自己的草案。这需要每个草案遵循逻辑一致性，这样我们就不需要处理之前和未来的矛盾。这样我们就不需要不断回头查看，但是这个方法不可扩展规模，如果我们有无数个律师，那么他们也要阅读无数个草案吗？
通过Tau我们能够处理这无数个合同草案，这些草案相当于Tau接下来的完全节点的提案，或者简单来说就是，多亏文档的逻辑形式化，可以精确计算出每个人同意的核心点，并列出和解决这些。不需要投票，而是像现实中处理小组讨论一样，只需要陈述观点，对话中的观点列表传给Tau这个智慧的聆听者。
现在就说到这里，未来在博客文章和其他的论文中再更详细解释，对于上述提到的内容（尤其是实际的社会选择和如何解决讨论扩展性这两个方面）非常期待您的观点和意见。

Website:
http://www.idni.org

Whitepaper (Draft):
https://www.idni.org/whitepaper_community_draft.pdf

Monthly Video Updates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0WhSrEqE7g&list=PLav2klOnTUlNKDE1xYVHi9zn9cqgpZead

Explanatory Videos:
Old Tau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFmaX-oumNw
New Tau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QZDYIO1EGA

Blog:
http://www.idni.org/blog/

Coinmarketcap:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/agoras-tokens/

IDNI Grant Application:
https://forms.gle/YQks4gUge5hGHoPcA

IDNI Ambassador Application:
https://forms.gle/32jQMWWv3rz1fUEq7

Exchanges :
BCEX: https://www.bcex.ca/trade/agrs_btc
WhiteBIT: https://whitebit.com/trade/AGRS_BTC
OmniDEX: https://www.omniwallet.org/dex/overview (Token: IDNI Agoras #58)

Social:
Telegram: https://t.me/tauchain
Discord: https://discord.gg/qZtJs78
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/tauchain/
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=950309.0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TauChainOrg
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixBquLFTBhLcUFVX0DDTpQ
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tauchain
QQ: https://jq.qq.com/?_wv=1027&k=5DkwnOX
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tau-chain/
IRC Chat: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=##idni
IRC Logs: http://tauchain.io/logs/fn/%23%23idni.log

Developers:
GitHub: https://github.com/IDNI
TML: https://github.com/IDNI/TML
IRC/Telegram Dev Chat: https://t.me/joinchat/ElCYP1TPyRalxhCgi_5HxA

Applications:
TML Bot (IRC/Telegram Dev Chat): https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/kxTHykmDHW/
TML Playground: https://tml.klapka.cz

Guide:
General: https://tau.guide
TML Playground: https://noahniuwa.github.io/tauchain-docs/#/tml-playground

Community Content:
https://github.com/martijnbolt/tau
https://www.tauchainfans.com
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@kevinwong/what-is-tauchain-and-why-it-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-inventions-of-all-time-part-1

@Fixx: We still haven't forgotten the contest. When will you do the payout? It's been years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm holding on to some of our just released Age of Chains crypto collectible trading cards. They come as limited hardware wallet editions (in oldschool 3.5" floppy disk format). 




---> Find out more <---

[/center]

Push.

Indeed, great to see Boeing also seeing value in using floppy disks.

I just published a blog article about our floppy disk edition:

https://www.ageofchains.com/limited-floppy-disk-hardware-wallet-edition/