Smart Contracts that Learn

Mike Slinn
March 24, 2018
Blockchain: the New Infrastructure of AI
About Mike Slinn
• Distinguished engineer
• Contributor to Ethereum Java and Scala libraries
• Expert witness
• Operates ScalaCourses.com
• Developing Ethereum courses
(www.cryptocourses.tech)
• Author of EmpathyWorks
• Twitter: mslinn
Key Facts about Mike Slinn
• Focuses on generating business value by
applying people, process and technology
• Wrote 3 books on distributed computing
• Created hundreds of online lectures on
advanced computing concepts
• Uses many computer languages (“polyglot”)
Confession
Smart contracts cannot actually learn

• HOWEVER •

• Distributed applications (ĐApps) can learn

• Various web3 components can too
What ĐApp Components Might Learn?

• User interface
• Gateway contracts
• Oracles
Beware Non-Deterministic Behavior
• Blockchain requires determinism
• An AI-driven product may not have
deterministic behavior and may produce
counter-intuitive results
• A personalized recommender system may
produce different results to a user action after
learning additional preferences
 Use Cases
With Architecture Diagrams
Self-Optimizing Contracts
• Optimize transactions for greatest margin,
minimal waste, constant deal flow, or other
criteria
• Results would improve over time
Genetic algorithms
Evolution strategies
Evolutionary programming
Simulated annealing
Gaussian adaptation
Hill climbing
Swarm intelligence
Integer linear programming
Fraudulent Event Detection
• Smart contracts currently act on all events
• Fraud detection often employs machine
learning
• Incorporating ML into smart contracts could
make them resistant to fraud
Automated Customer Service Agents
• Chatbots and voice interfaces
• Much more natural to use
• Can be built into devices
Medical Diagnosis Expert System
• Smart contract mediates access to an expert
system (oracle)
• Accepts anonymous patient data
• Passes data to an expert system that
performs analysis using machine learning
• Returns diagnostic results
• Charges for the service
Learning
How do Computers Learn?
• Trial and error with feedback
• Training
Types of Machine Learning
Association rule
Artificial neural networks
Bayesian networks
Clustering
Decision tree
Deep
Genetic algorithms
Inductive logic programming
Classifier systems
Reinforcement
Representation
Rule-based
Similarity and metric
Sparse dictionary
Support vector machines
How Might Smart Contracts Learn?
• “Learning” computation must occur off-chain
• Enforced by the Ethereum fee structure
 Machine Learning Applications
Automated theorem proving
Adaptive websites
Bioinformatics
Classifying DNA sequences
Detecting credit-card fraud
General game playing
Information retrieval
Internet fraud detection
Insurance
Linguistics
Medical diagnosis
Machine perception, including computer
vision and object recognition
Optimization and metaheuristic
Recommendation systems
Robot locomotion (autonomy)
Sentiment analysis
Speech and handwriting recognition
Structural health monitoring
Syntactic pattern recognition
User behavior analytics
Translation
Caution
Security / Complexity Tradeoff
Solidity and Security
• Contracts written in Solidity are difficult to
make secure.
o Formal verification could help.
• Solidity’s support for types is primitive
Security Cannot Be Retrofitted
• Secure systems can only be designed that
way from the start
o Trying to secure an existing platform can only give
marginal improvements
• Need orders of magnitude of improvements
to smart contract security
o Not possible without a fresh start
Better Language
Support
Pact / Kadena
• Functional, interpreted Lisp-like syntax
• Features type inference
• Similar to database stored procedures in an
online transaction processing (OLTP) system
• Not Turing complete
• Runs on the Kadena blockchain
AxLang
• Smart contract language designed to support
formal verification.
• Cross-compiled Scala DSL for Ethereum
• Designed to scale
• Not yet ready
Thank you! Questions?
Mike Slinn
mslinn@micronauticsresearch.com
650-678-2285