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Darryl Neudorf 0:13
Welcome to the climate and coordination RCast, where every week we’ll be discussing topics related to all things climate change, and RChain’s role in the solution. We will be discussing technologies that can adapt and coordinate massive amounts of data like never before forming social architectures that grow collective intelligence, sharing and evaluating data planetarily, all while maintaining personal privacy and personal data ownership. A new decentralized economy is forming as we move from the third Industrial Revolution: “digitization” to the fourth: “decarbonisation”. By building a co op, built on a correct by construction, concurrent, scalable solution. RChain is structured to build out the new technology that will be required for a flourishing regenerative planet. Please join us on this journey.
Darryl Neudorf 1:10
Hey everybody, welcome to the climate and coordination RCast for Friday, September 4. Unfortunately, Nora can’t be with us today. So we have a couple very special guests today, Magnolia and Basil from Synsapien. And I guess we made their acquaintance a couple of weeks ago and we’re excited about having them on the podcast. So welcome guys.
MInolya Adan 1:45
Thank you so much really excited to be here to speak with you all.
Greg Meredith 1:49
Yeah, it’s a pleasure I had the pleasure of in of participating in the your RChain coop membership interview. And got to know you a little bit more. So really delighted to be able to have you on the climate coordination call.
MInolya Adan 2:10
Yeah, that was a really nice surprise. I wasn’t expecting to meet you. So it was great.
Greg Meredith 2:17
It was, and I’m very interested in your mission, maybe you can tell the RChain community a little bit about what you guys are doing?
MInolya Adan 2:28
Yeah, of course, I think it might make sense to kind of give you a bit of a backstory to maybe describe our journey and how we got to where we are now. I was working in a cancer research lab a long time and now nearly a decade or so ago. And we were working on this amazing new therapeutic that could help to treat metastatic breast cancer. And it came to my attention there were about four or five other labs across the world that will work With the exact same therapeutic, but yet there wasn’t any data being shared, we weren’t really speaking to each other. We certainly weren’t sharing any knowledge. And that was this atmosphere of competition that was preventing progress in something that I thought competition should certainly not get in the way of it. So some time went by, I kind of diverted my attention more to the environmental sphere of things and delved into a bit of our planet’s biggest problems. And, you know, I think that there’s competition is really overarching and how we’re running the world today. And we really tried to push for a technology that could help us overcome this and make sure that people were collaborating towards coming up with solutions to our most pressing challenges, climate being our focus of attention. Would you like to add anything to that Basil?
Basil Mahfouz 3:57
Yeah, sure. I think part of beyond The kind of the problem space of the Minolya described, from my side, I used to work for a research funder. And this, you know, government institution would fund, you know, hundreds and thousands of researchers around around the Middle East. And what we started doing is realizing, you know, for projects that could get a bit of you get stalled or have some challenges or problems that need fixing, we just organize these interdisciplinary workshops. So they’re all kind of on the same payroll. So we thought, you know, let’s bring in these people from different universities in different speciality, just have them, you know, crack at it and try to solve them. We just saw one there’s happening on the state in that space. So you just have someone say, Okay, I’m having a problem. And then a physicist and an economist and a chemical engineer kind of jump together and they figure it out. And it just really progressed, the rate of research and innovation that was happening. Then we saw, you know, well, here’s the problem and here’s a solution. Let’s bridge them together and create a digital infrastructure that would enable that to happen.
MInolya Adan 5:05
Yeah, that that sounds about right. So I think that that kind of gives an overview of, of what we’re working towards. We started with a few different questions, one of them being, you know, how can we make sure that we have a limitless number of people involved in one project at a time? If push comes to shove, how can we involve 1000 different people and in really coming up with solutions to urgent things, like for instance, the the ventilator that everyone was so desperate for during the pandemic, if we had an infrastructure in place to be able to coordinate that conversation, what would that look like? And, you know, we’ve been working on this for about two years now. And we by no means claim to have answers to all of the questions that we’re asking, but we do think that we’re asking questions that could have major impact down the line.
Greg Meredith 5:59
It’s very interesting, it seems to me that you folks are focusing on the coordination aspect of this. And, and that’s very much in alignment with, with what RChain is looking at. We see the, the, a lot of the climate issues while they will need, you know, direct solutions, that at least as much there’s a coordination problem. And hence, the title of this particular RCast, which is climate and coordination. So, it’s interesting that you arrived at the same similar conclusion about this space.
MInolya Adan 6:50
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, Nancy Roberts is an incredible professor. I think that she walks in the Naval Research Laboratory, but she talks about these issues in terms of being super wicked challenges that we’re faced with now. And, and climate change, I think is is kind of something that fits all of her criteria for what a super wicked challenge is. And she describes three different modes of innovating towards solving these and you know, you have hierarchies, you have competitive models, but the last one and the one which we certainly have not mastered, yet is collaborative models of, of innovation. And the challenge with collaboration is, is the coordination piece, we really need to get a lot better coordinating ourselves and I think that we are at a point now with technology with things like blockchain, where we have the technology that we need to be able to coordinate effectively, we just need to start piecing them together.
Greg Meredith 7:47
Indeed, I mean, you know, if you’re going to widen this scope to talk about sort of wicked problems and super wicked problems, I mean, I I believe it was Horst Rittel who originally came up with the term wicked problems. So I hadn’t heard the super wicked problem nomenclature. It’s, it’s very apt. But if we widen the scope, you know, Yuval Harari in his book, Sapiens talks about, you know, homosapien’s superpower is coordination. You know, and he gives lots and lots of examples, right, you know, going back to the origin, you know, the early days of the species a single homo sapien doesn’t stand a chance against a, you know, a woolly mammoth. But they were able to work, you know, in coordination, they, they hunted in coordination, to the point where, you know, those populations were decimated by by this strange primates superpowers of coordination. So, it is it is one of our superpowers and when we think about the tooling that that Homo sapiens has developed, you know, obviously, capital is this super amazing tool that Homo Sapiens has developed as a coordination tool. However, when we transitioned from physical notions of capital, to digital notions of capital, the inequities were accelerated, because because you could iterate through cycles and in digital forms much much faster than you could in, you know, physical monetary systems. As soon as computers are involved, and you don’t have to manufacture anything physical, then you can go through many, many, many more generations of trade in much shorter timeframe. And as a result, the sort of the built in imbalances were dramatically accelerated. And as a result, we now have a situation where capital is stuck in the hands of a few. And this is this is well documented. But what it means is that capital is a tool for exploring different coordination models is basically busted. It’s broken. Just we’re not in a place where, where capital is, well organized to allow us to explore more coordination models using capital. And it’s I think it’s no accident that blockchain comes along with the with the potential to reboot Capital structures where, you know, literally with a single button press, people have the ability to mend tokens and to and to put forward rules of token exchange that are algorithmically enforced. So, so I think the blockchain has, has a lot to do there in terms of returning the utility of capital as a tool to the tool belt of homosapiens. You know, in terms of coordination. Likewise, governance has been, at least when we talk about climate, it’s been super, super, super slow. You know, the Paris accords Are you know, and the lack of agreement, you know, even recently, when there is no it is no one Wonder why, you know, attentive teenagers like Greta Thunberg, you know, who are following the process with some alarm are going, you guys are just moving way too slow to get done what we need to get done in a timeframe where we’re not all going to suffer much more than we have to.
Greg Meredith 12:29
So again governance as a deliberative process is not yet able to take advantage of some of the digital efficiencies. But blockchain as a as a capability as a tool can certainly support exploration of new models. And I do think that is a place where we’re going to have some of the biggest challenges, because it’s not okay to carve up things along geopolitical boundaries that have to do with the existence of all life on Earth. If you burn down the Amazon, the impact to all of life on earth is too dramatic. And so, you know, I don’t believe that the global population is going to accept that the stewardship of the Amazon if it’s not handled responsibly, on the basis of geopolitical boundaries, and there are lots of other examples of resources that have global impact where we have to have more global regulation, and so the existing nation state geopolitical governance models are not well suited to what we’re facing now. But blockchain as a decentralized mechanism has the ability to support a better global local interface, I guess, is the way to put it. And then finally, and then I’ll shut up and I’d love to hear you guys’s response. Social telecommunications has emerged as another powerful, powerful tool for homosapiens to use to coordinate. But when, you know, as an example, Facebook is weaponized by a foreign power, and then Facebook, you know makes these draconian responses to that, it shows that it’s not yet well organized to support the kind of coordination that we need and and you know, it’s been a story that’s been told now for over a decade: the market appetite for decentralized Facebook is actually very, very high. The reason we don’t have one today I mean, the response to Diaspora was overwhelming right when four kids from college said we want to make a decentralized Facebook, and their Kickstarter was just overwhelmed with response. Likewise, ello was was at one point, gaining 5 million new users every hour, because they promised a decentralized version of Facebook. Nobody has been able to succeed because they didn’t have a good technology base. But blockchain comes along and if it is architected correctly, could potentially provide that decentralized force to make these decentralized information utilities, you know, a decentralized, Twitter, decentralized Facebook, these kinds of things that could facilitate, you know, the kind of coordination that we’re talking about. And it was those observations that made me feel like using blockchain to address these kinds of coordination problems was definitely the way to go. But I’ve long had an eye to the scientific communities and would love to hear your angle and perspective on how blockchain could be used in the coordination of the scientific communities.
Basil Mahfouz 16:49
Sure, thank you for that one. I think for kick off here, there’s I mean, based on a few things you said, I’d love to kind of give some points. So I’ve been to my share of climate protests and you know, other demonstrations demanding political change or action towards climate change and other issues that I care deeply about them. It just always kind of frustrated me to go down there. Because you see, all these people have, you know, thousands sometimes, you know, hundreds of thousands of people down the street and they’re all standing there saying, you know, we demand change, you know, someone do something about it. And my message is always been, you know, the same all them, stop demanding the governments and institutions to do something about it, do something about it yourself, and you don’t need to sit there and demand someone else to do this work for you. You know, we’re all here. You know, the hours we’re spending, you know, sometimes over days demanding these these changes, we could just get together and figure out a way to solve these problems. So I think this is where blockchain comes in because I’ve tried to organize some of these and it’s impossible you have thousands of people, you know, how do you manage such a conversation? What – you get someone in a loudspeaker and scream and someone else replies back at this just how do you manage a conversation at that scale? How do you manage ideation process just figuring out what to do and making a decision let alone getting the work done. And I guess the second side of the coin is I’ve got feeding back on the on the nation state system and I think there’s a key fundamental issue here that we need to address and you know, I’m definitely not one to to to advocate what’s happening in the Amazon as justifiable, but it’s also puts us in a very precarious position because we can’t come in and we’re in the UK here you go outside of London. There’s not a tree in sight. Everything’s been cut down everywhere you go. It’s now farms and fields. So you simply cannot go to countries like Brazil or countries like India or whatnot and tell them no, no, no, don’t cut down your forests. Don’t burn coal, you know, we can’t do that anymore when we went, you know, we’ve done it here ourselves for centuries. So the conversation cannot start that way. And again, it brings about this notion or the need for coordination mechanism, which is saying, fine, you can’t do this, here’s a solution, or here’s an alternative for you to do so. And we’re providing it for you because we’ve now developed all the know how and technology over the years because we’ve cut down all these forests and because we’ve had access to coal and other cheap energy, to be able to enable us to have all this, you know, technology, universities, development, etc. And by doing by enable, it’s sort of the framework here becomes, you know what, let’s join the conversation. And you know, how we have, we’ll put it up there. And this is, you know, a way to coordinate technology transfer outside of the institutional typical hierarchical structures that we’ve created to coordinate these types of problem solving issues.
MInolya Adan 20:01
Yeah, I agree with that. It’s, you know, no one wants a single tree in the Amazon to get cut down when you’re standing on this side of the fence, but it’s certainly a contentious issue because it’s super hypocritical for us to say no, don’t cut it down as Basil said, you go for a wander in the countryside here, and all of it is farmland. But going back to the protests that you mentioned, Basil, I think that, you know, we, we all kind of go and we say we and we want change, we want change. But something in particular that really struck me as a friend of ours had a packard saying more vegan meals, right? It’s just like one simple suggestion. That is so much more powerful than saying, stop harming animals. It’s obviously I mean, I know maybe it’s not obvious but I’m all pro animal rights and very much along that side of the movement, but it’s a lot more constructive to the way that things are governed to actually ask for change in an actionable way. So when you go into organizing these conversations, you’re able to get down to the nitty gritty of what actually has to change. And going back to what you said, Greg, I think that you know, we, we have blockchain now we have this super powerful tool that can actually give us the power to govern ourselves. So when we’re talking about changing the geopolitical sphere and, and making sure that the way that we are governed as a planet isn’t based on lines that were drawn on maps, however many decades ago, it gives us a system of self governance, but there’s a lot of work. We still have to do in that space.
Darryl Neudorf 21:55
I just like to point out something that was just discussed here, and that is the interconnectedness of some of the things you were just talking about.
Greg Meredith 22:06
The Amazon in Brazil, the reason why the forests are getting cut down is to provide beef for the North American and European, primarily populations. Yeah, through the corporation, largely one corporation, Monsanto is, you know, the fuel for this. So it kind of points out the whole interconnectedness of everything here and why it is so vital that we all kind of somehow develop a global self awareness where we can become globally aware of all the decisions that are being made all over the world. And so I really applaud your efforts because I think you’re right on target with what we need to do.
Basil Mahfouz 23:00
Thank you. Thank you, for that was very generous of you to say that. Yeah, I think that we’re in agreement that what we, what we’re attempting here is is much larger than ourselves. And often we kind of have a moment with each other where we’re like we definitely bitten off more than we can chew. But there is this sense that it’s certainly going to be worth it if we manage to pull it off by, by some miracle, some technological advancement. But I think the reason why we focus on environmental technology actually, I don’t know if I mentioned that we focus on technology before just now but most of our emphasis is on tech. And the reason for that is that it doesn’t require as much political governance it raises or alleviates some of that dependency that we have on being governed on getting the right policies out, on making sure that the priorities of our politicians are in line with what needs to happen in the, in the planet. Jacques Fresco, who I think founded the Venus Project once said, or I mean, not a direct quote, but something along the lines, that laws are required where technology fails. And I really believe in this, you know, you have laws against drunk driving, but the second that you have self driving cars, maybe that law isn’t required anymore. So, it comes to a point where if we have loads of brilliant renewable energy mechanisms, and loads of even at something as simple as really good and tasty meat substitutes that are plant based, then you don’t need to legislate for this stuff as much anymore. And it really relieves us of needing to be governed properly, so to speak.
Greg Meredith 24:59
Yeah, I absolutely agree that focusing on positive solutions is a much better fit in terms of, you know, the, the way that we modify behavior for ourselves and, and other living creatures. You don’t get very far if you have a heavy, heavy punishing regime, when training a dog, positive feedback is much, much, much better as a mechanism. So focusing on solutions, you know, sort of, it’s not just that it’s practical in a lot of ways, but it also gets gets at this sort of hindbrain forebrain thing that I think has been very very divisive in, in a lot of the political discourse anyway, certainly in the US, it’s very difficult for people across these cultural divides to have, you know, reasoned discourse, evidence based discourse. It devolves into these, these emotional or, or tribal kinds of lines and that isn’t helping anybody. But if you can simply say, “hey, doesn’t this meal taste great?” Guess what, it doesn’t have any meat in it! I mean, I have lots of experience with that. I have been a vegetarian for more than 40 years, but I also I’m a musician and one of the ways that I I feel like I pay my balance to my band members is when they come to my studio to practice, I cook them a meal. And, you know, I’ve had them, I’ve had people, you know, very frequently go, Wow, I never I never knew tofu could taste so good and these kinds of things. So, you know it has a direct you know, visceral and positive impact because they can they can taste for themselves a solution. So, as I agree with that kind of organization, but I also think that that the playing field can be very, very unlevel. You know, I think the oil industry worked very hard to squeeze out renewable solutions for a very long time. I know for example, it was a practice of theirs to buy up patents on promising energy technologies and simply shelve them. And, and so we, you know, we are we are going to have to deal with those kinds of behaviors, even when, even as we’re focusing on practical and positive solutions. And that’s, that’s where I think, you know, having open on chain conversations can can help with the discourse as well, so that we can expose those kinds of behaviors. And we can have curated conversations where people can’t go, Oh, that’s fake news. Because you know, you can get lots and lots of people providing …. on chain and connected to our particular topic of discord. And, and and the evidence base grows so that you know, it’s it’s it’s harder for people to to hide things in the dark, like, like was done with the with the sort of the oil industry and its approach to various technologies
Basil Mahfouz 29:27
I’m really I’m really happy to hear to hear you say that because I remember being at a talk and someone I don’t know there were part of which intellectual Patent Office or some kind of intellectual something and they just come up and saying, Well you know what, you know, green innovation is booming. Look at all these green patents that have been, you know, signed up and and are growing it. Look, it might just be that a lot of these technologies are paid and will go be commercialized. But as you said, the first thought is, wait, how many of these were actually just paid into protect and shelf. And that is actually a problem, not a solution that we can, you know, we can’t really sit there to determine which ones were being used for the real purpose of it to actually bring them to market or which ones are being shoved politically. But I think we have a very powerful solution to stop this practice from happening. It goes down into intellectual property law, if something is disclosed publicly if something exists somewhere on the on the internet anywhere. That is, you know, even if I put something in a public library on the last shelf, as long as people can access it, no one can patent that technology. And that is where we can actually stop these, this terrible practice of you know, inventing, and shelving because as long as you have a community that’s able to create some form of technology or some form of patentable intellectual property, disclose it, that’s it. They can use it to bring it to market which is great if they can do so. But at least we’ve stopped them from stopping anyone else from from using it. And I think this is a very strong card that let’s say that the global community or the open innovation community can play Tu Tu, Tu, Tu, basically put these mega corporations in a corner, it’s their Achilles heel really. And I think that’s one of the strategies we’re gonna be employing, which is to you know, fine if you can take this innovation and bring it to market at a lower cost than anyone else great because you brought in a low cost green innovation to market at the lowest possible cost good on but these you can’t stop other people from bringing it and from from building one.
Greg Meredith 31:45
Yeah, I’m, I’m also interested in intellectual property. I mean, I had a weird experience in industry where, you know, in the, in the company, one of the major companies I worked for, you know, I had a team of Lawyers following me around. And, you know, I mean, this is this was during defensive patent heyday strategy for a large corporation in Redmond, Washington, whose name I won’t mention here. And and you know, so it was I didn’t consider it to be particularly efficient or a good use of intellectual property. And as I began to develop what I felt were more and more impactful ideas and ideas that I felt had. I was concerned if they were they were held behind the firewall of one Corporation. I shifted my strategy and left the corporate, the corporate world and made a conscious decision to create as much public disclosure as possible. You have to be really careful, because not all, not all patent laws are the same in different jurisdictions. So it’s, it’s quite, it’s quite possible to have disclosure, even in a couple of major theatres. And, and yet it’s still been patented in you know, yet another jurisdiction. So it’s not it’s not just that there’s a disclosure, and I can tell you from personal experience that the counsel will tell you not to be particularly active in looking in prior art, because you don’t want to be educated about prior art in patent discussion. So you have to be you have to be a little bit clever. If you take the approach of that I’ve done which is to ensure that there’s as much public disclosure as possible so what I’ve done is to try to make it so that, at least with the kinds of ideas I’m talking about, you have to be living under a rock, not to have heard about these ideas on the internet, like even even one Google Search should yield the the the ideas and so then it becomes much less defensible that you hadn’t heard about the prior art. But to be perfectly honest. It’s a tricky business. But I have a vested interest. I believe that there are technologies that are much better in the hands of the public than they are behind any private corporation. And, you know, I’ve been talking about them for almost two decades now. And, you know, so so I’m actually quite interested in in folks who are looking at intellectual property as a as a mechanism for coordination Maybe you guys can talk a little bit about what you’re doing there.
MInolya Adan 35:06
Yeah, sure. I think that what first and foremost, well, we’re still very much figuring out what we’re doing here. I think that a lot of the changes that we would like to see are very hard to actually realize what we’re talking about here is a revolution in the way that we recognize intellectual property. So it’s, it’s a bit of a tough pill to swallow on the surface of things. But when you start looking into what’s actually going on in the legal sphere knew…. there was a conference proceedings from the patenting office approach to blockchain. I think a lot of the a lot of the topics that they covered were discussing how to patent blockchain technology, but they did manage to identify blockchain as a possible revolution in the way that patents were actually held. When you have something as powerful as blockchain to prove the provenance of an idea or an image or whatever it may be, then it starts to become a very powerful tool in actually protecting IP in the same way that, you know, we used to get told to email ourselves a copy of an essay as a form of copyright. I think that blockchain very much holds something even stronger than you know, emailing something to yourself, so to speak. So that’s something that we’re looking into or we’re also looking at how blockchain can change our approach to to patenting things and also change our approach to open source. I think the the risk with open source now is that a lot of the creatives aren’t getting renumerated and aren’t getting rewarded for their work and as as much as I support the blossoming of this open source altruistic community do feel what that we’re in danger of these hobbyist intellectuals being taken for a ride in a manner of speaking, when we look at how dependent Facebook and Google and the biggest companies in the world are becoming on open source technology and yet these people are working on on donations and, and building reputations within GitHub so I am very interested to see how we can use blockchain to log the open source effort and to actually see the returns going back to these people. Right.
Basil Mahfouz 37:35
I’d add to that and say, so right now, for innovators around the world actually getting some sort of patent or intellectual property protection is is quite difficult, quite expensive, and for the most part out of reach for most people outside of a corporation unless they have a giant Trust Fund to their name. So you know, let alone the cost to patent in one territory, then the cost to do so and to protect your IP in other territories, then the maintenance fees as well as the lawyer fees to get all this done. Even if you had someone infringe upon it in a clever or other way, you’re gonna have to pay you know a lot more to try to get your rights restored. They’re not to say that there hasn’t been success stories of people managing to get their worth back. But it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of innovation around the world is being stopped, particularly in climate change where we need innovation the most right now, because simply there is no mechanism to encourage small scale innovators or small scale inventors that don’t have the resources of giant corporations. And this is where a blockchain kind of secure space can can can be helpful. In essence, we’re able to control who sees what and have a have a proof of who has seen what, when, and essentially this is where your entry to view these innovations as intellectual property, your first step of control is there. So you by virtue of enabling people to see the innovation they’ve already agreed to have done some form of contractual agreement that prevents them from commercialising what is seen on this, let’s say private private ledger, at least I mean, I call it the private ledger. But there’s there is a barrier to entry to see that ledger at least you have to verify your identity and agree to certain conditions. So once you’ve created this space, when different innovators are working together and log their innovations there, they can be safe and and feel safe that their inventions aren’t won in the public realm where anyone can take them because even those people who see them somehow agreed to not utilize our abuse. information there. So this enables a space for sharing knowledge collaborating, finding people to not just grow your, your idea or your invention to a better product, but also to share it with potential people who can realize and bring it to market all within a semi open space. So right now, what we’re proposing is a midpoint between one the traditional patent things and you know, hope you have, you know, a couple of million dollars in the bank to be able to make sure that no one infringes on your intellectual property and the open source page where, you know, we’ll create or innovate and then we’re lucky if we get any sort of renumeration from it. And I think this integration as the laywers said, there’s a lot of more work that we and others have to do to make sure that this balance is struck. But this is where blockchain offers a perfect technological infrastructure to be able to have this type of intellectual property exchange and conversation.
Greg Meredith 41:01
Yes, one of the things that RChain is working on to dramatically improve all of that is I’ve been working with some mathematicians for quite some time now to develop. How do I say this? It goes back to the foundations of what is a logic. So that’s, that’s been in exploration for about 3000 years. But, but, but but this question of what a logic is, hasn’t quite been front and center. We owe the same kind of question showed up in the early to mid 1900s. Around geometry so people, people, people recognize that you can draw Euclid fifth postulate and still get reasonable and interesting structures. And in fact, some of those structures were more more likely to represent the physical world or the world in which physics takes place. Then, Euclidean geometries, but suddenly there was a there was a zoo of geometries. And you know, mathematicians like Kline, and Karton and Ehresmann. Were were interested in providing some organization was like what is a geometry? What constitutes a geometry? And they were able to successfully answer that question to a degree of success that, you know, we do have a notion of differential geometry and in that it does provide a kind of unit unified presentation of what a geometry is. Now still there lots and lots of questions. But, um, we haven’t yet had an answer what is a logic in the same way. But the work that I’ve been doing with these other mathematicians, is aimed at answering that question with the goal in mind to provide a kind of unifying framework. And the algorithm that we have developed provides us a way to generate logics from data about models of computation. So there are lots of models of computation, right so the Java Virtual Machine is a practical model of computation. The Haskell compiler is a practical model of computation. The x86 specification is a is a model of computation. But also at the the more abstract in the lambda calculus, the PI calculus and the row calculus are all models of computation. So we’re, we’re, we’re swimming in seas of models of computation. But unfortunately, that is thing that we associate with those IE code is not searchable. So you can look at GitHub repositories, and you can’t really search them on the basis of what the code is, or how it’s structured. People are, they resort to tagging and to social mechanisms to search, you know, Alice knows someone who knows someone who knows about this repository that does what you want it to do. And while that again, that’s it can have some utility, it doesn’t have the same kind of utility as being able to serve on the basis of how code is structured, and what it does, but these algorithms provide logics that ultimately generate the query mechanisms. And so we, we, in future iterations of RChain, the plan is to roll out these these algorithms, so that these kinds of databases like GitHub, and other kinds of databases, such as biological databases, you know, not not just the big ones like Swiss prod, but but the boutique databases that have grown up around cell signaling regimes and others. We did the algorithms that we’ve generated provide a mechanism to make those databases queryable and a new kind of way where you can query on the basis of dynamics As well as structure.
Greg Meredith 46:03
And so we think that those kinds of query mechanisms will make these these data sources, much more, I have much, much higher utility. As a result, it means that we have to be very, very circumspect about these query mechanisms being in the hands of the public, because suddenly it makes, you know, healthcare databases and geolocation databases, much more potent, much more powerful. And so we don’t believe that they should, or I personally don’t believe they should be in the hands of corporations. They need to be in the hands of the public and not necessarily in the hands of, of the existing geopolitical base govern governance. They need to be in the hands of people People who are are empowered with a self organizing organizing capability like the blockchain. So, but it also helps a great deal with the patent question. Because now you can do search for prior art on a completely different basis. You can do connections between different inventions, especially if they’re represented in code, or in other kinds of formal representations. You can search for connections between them. And in fact, you can begin to I’ve sketched out algorithm as early as 1996. I sketched out algorithms while I was working at British Telecom, the martlesham Heath research group, I sketched out a framework in which you can use these algorithms to piece together code that was never written in the first place, right? So you have a you have a query for a code that matches a particular kind of type or logical formula. And you hit the repo and it says, Well, I have these pieces of code that will get you this far, and gives you a formula for how far it gets you and a formula for what the delta is. And then you can you can recursively, iterate on the Delta looking for repositories that that will cover the Delta, and then piece together code that will that will ultimately meet the specification that was the original query. So RChain is really focused on sort of core technologies that will support the kinds of things that you’re talking about. And we have the goods, and then we can show you the algorithms and I’ve been talking about them openly and publicly for decades now. So we’re very excited to see To see people who are looking at these kinds of problems, because it’s consensual validation that that other people are seeing the world in the way that we’re seeing it.
MInolya Adan 49:13
Yeah, I think I’m completely on board with that. And it’s, it’s interesting to see because, well, I don’t feel like we’re alone in this either. I think that the more you’ve delved into our own research, the more we’ve come across other companies that are attempting to do similar things, or looking at a very similar space. And, you know, coming back to the algorithms that you described, I think one company in particular that, that we’ve spoken with, and they’ve become good friends is a company called, I never know how to say it properly. It’s any Neu or new, so to speak, but what they did was brilliant in mapping out human knowledge in a very different way and and we had very similar ideas about, you know, if we could have this very different visualization of knowledge and the interconnectedness of patents or fields, or even research journals. I mean, going back to my thesis I was, I was looking into the sustainability of vertical farms. And the more I did my research, the more I found new ways that people were describing vertical farms, we had a plant factory, or something else. So I was missing key bits of research, because I was using words to search for it. So I can I can certainly see the power and in a very different way of searching for things and having either code or, or patterns or something else connected in a different way because, you know, words don’t always succeed and giving us the right information.
Basil Mahfouz 50:55
I think there’s a great book called Innovation Algorithm by Altshuller is a Soviet patent officer and inventor and he’s done this brilliant mechanism called TRIZ. I mean, different engineers have different ways of, you know, have different opinions on the matter. But ultimately, what he, his main conclusion is every problem in every field has been solved in a different field. So it’s not necessarily it’s the same solution, but it’s more of the principle behind which the problem was solved. And so by looking at these, you know, that, on a principle level, what you’re trying to solve by what metrics can be inferred, and you could, he’s created a tool, I mean, it’s quite rudimentary, but, you know, you know, this is we’re talking 20, 30 years ago now. So you know, imagine could build upon something like this to, to more quickly come to a solution to a problem based on what has already been solved in a similar principle in other fields.
Greg Meredith 52:03
Well, we’re, it’s it’s 9:25 or 9:26. Some of us have to dash to a staff meeting in just four minutes. I wonder if Darryl you had any final thoughts or, or if our guests have any final thoughts?
MInolya Adan 52:25
It’s it’s been an absolute pleasure for us. Thank you very much for for having us here. I’m really excited to get to know the RChain community and the technology a lot better to speak with you in the future as well.
Darryl Neudorf 52:41
Yeah, let’s keep this conversation ongoing. It’s fantastic. So good to meet you guys.
MInolya Adan 52:47
Great to meet you, too. This has been really fun. Thank you.
Greg Meredith 52:52
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, let’s keep keep the keep the dialogue going.
MInolya Adan 52:59
Absolutely.
Greg Meredith 53:02
So Darryl, you want to bring us out?
Darryl Neudorf 53:04
Okay, I’ll give it a try. Nora usually does this but I’ll give it a try. Okay, here’s my version. So if you’ve been interested by this conversation, and you would like to join us in our, in our world of attempting to find global self awareness for our species, please join our RChain Co Op, just go to www.rchain.coop and click on the button on the top right side and c heck out www.synsapien.org. All right, thanks, everybody.
Greg Meredith 53:43
Thank you, y’all. Have a good weekend.