Tauchain: The automated programmer

A less understood feature of Tauchain is the feature called "program synthesis" in academic literature. This is a feature that as far as I know no one else in the crypto community is investigating. This feature of program synthesis when combined with the knowledge based AI discussed in my previous posts(1,2), would allow Tauchain to leverage the trend of big data. As the collective knowledge base of Tauchain expands, the capability of this automated programmer will improve. The automatic programmer will reason over an increasing collective knowledge base to allow Tauchain to in a sense "program itself". Smart contract developers will gain piece of mind knowing that their smart contracts are formally verified (for correctness) and users will be able to contribute to the development by joining in as a group to accurately describe the behavior of the code.

The impact of program synthesis and knowledge based AI on the smart contract development community

Let's discuss what this means for smart contract developer. A smart contract developer today has to deal with creating a white paper, then a formal specification, then do the programming and formal verification themselves. This is very difficult for humans to do and as a result very few people are able to write secure smart contracts yet almost everyone can come up with some interesting idea for a smart contract. Program synthesis will allow individuals or a group of people to specify in a simple yet controlled natural language such as a simple English what they want (this creates the formal specification) and from this description of what they want the automatic programmer will handle the rest. The code will in a sense be written automatically by the AI by reasoning over a knowledge base which could include the knowledge necessary to produce the code for that smart contract.

AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs?

In summary, each participant in Tauchain will be able to speak to their "automated programmer" in a language they are comfortable with. They'll describe as accurately as they can the functioning and behavior of the program or smart contract. The automated programmer will then reason over a very large knowledge base and if it is smart enough it will automatically generate the code for the smart contract from their description. The participant will then either be satisfied with what was generated or not satisfied and update their description so as to trigger the process until they are satisfied. This is yet another breakthrough feature which Tauchain may be able to offer to the crypto-community in addition to potentially solving the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem.

References

1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331144-500-ai-learns-to-write-its-own-code-by-stealing-from-other-programs/
2. https://excape.cis.upenn.edu/documents/MosheVardi.pdf
3. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bornholt/post/synthesis-for-architects.html