Lane Four

lanefour

Queen Elizabeth gave the name “Virginia

Adaptive Graph Neural Networks for Cosmological Data Generalization: Acknowledgements and Disclosure

This paper is under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv Authors: (1) Kota Chin, University of Tsukuba, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japan; (2) Keita Emura, Kanazawa University, Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japan; (3) Kazumasa Omote, University of Tsukuba National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japan. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Preliminaries Proposed Anonymous Yet Accountable Contract Wallet System Implementation Conclusion & References V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we proposed an anonymous yet accountable contract wallet system based on account abstraction and accountable ring signatures. The proposed system is implemented using Solidity for zkSync. Moreover, we discussed potential of the proposed system, e.g., medical information sharing and asset management. Since the current implementation results using Solidity show the required costs are expensive, our result here might be regarded as somewhat conceptual. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous implementation result is known that confirms the cost to run an accountable ring signature scheme in Solidity to date, and we believe that our result can be seen as an important stepping stone to provide anonymity and accountability simultaneously in blockchain systems. Investigating other applications of the proposed system will be left to future work. The underlying account ring signature scheme does not provide post-quantum security due to the discrete logarithm-based construction. Thus, it is difficult to accept the current construction as a platform to manage large amounts of assets due to the progress of quantum computing. Because a post-quantum accountable ring signature scheme has been proposed in [7], it would be interesting to employ the scheme, precisely, how to implement it using Solidity is left to future work. The authors would like to thank Dr. Miyako Ohkubo (NICT) for her invaluable comments and suggestions. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21K11897 and JP22H03588. Acknowledgment: REFERENCES [1] Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash. https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado-cash/. August 12, 2022. [2] StarkNet. https://starkware.co/starknet/. [3] zkSync. https://zksync.io/. [4] Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Daniel J. Bernstein, Ward Beullens, Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Scott Fluhrer, Stefan-Lukas Gazdag, Andreas H ¨ulsing, Panos Kampanakis, Stefan K ¨olbl, Tanja Lange, Martin M. Lauridsen, Florian Mendel, Ruben Niederhagen, Christian Rechberger, Joost Rijneveld, Peter Schwabe, and Bas Westerbaan. SPHINCS+: Submission to the NIST post-quantum project, v.3.1. https://sphincs.org/data/sphincs+-r3.1-specification.pdf. [5] Asaph Azaria, Ariel Ekblaw, Thiago Vieira, and Andrew Lippman. MedRec: Using blockchain for medical data access and permission management. In 2016 2nd International Conference on Open and Big Data (OBD), pages 25–30, 2016. [6] Eli Ben-Sasson, Iddo Bentov, Yinon Horesh, and Michael Riabzev. Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity. IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., page 46, 2018. [7] Ward Beullens, Samuel Dobson, Shuichi Katsumata, Yi-Fu Lai, and Federico Pintore. Group signatures and more from isogenies and lattices: Generic, simple, and efficient. In EUROCRYPT, pages 95–126, 2022. [8] Ward Beullens, Shuichi Katsumata, and Federico Pintore. Calamari and Falafl: Logarithmic (linkable) ring signatures from isogenies and lattices. In ASIACRYPT, pages 464–492, 2020. [9] Dmytro Bogatov, Angelo De Caro, Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, and Bj ¨orn Tackmann. Anonymous transactions with revocation and auditing in hyperledger fabric. In CANS, pages 435–459, 2021. [10] Jonathan Bootle, Andrea Cerulli, Pyrros Chaidos, Essam Ghadafi, Jens Groth, and Christophe Petit. Short accountable ring signatures based on DDH. In ESORICS, pages 243–265, 2015. [11] Vitalik Buterin, Ansgar Dietrichs, Matt Garnett, Will Villanueva, and Sam Wilson. EIP-2938: Account Abstraction. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2938, 2020. [12] Jan Camenisch, Manu Drijvers, and Maria Dubovitskaya. Practical ucsecure delegatable credentials with attributes and their application to blockchain. In ACM CCS, pages 683–699, 2017. [13] David Chaum and Eug`ene van Heyst. Group signatures. In EUROCRYPT, pages 257–265, 1991. [14] Aisling Connolly, J´er ˆome Deschamps, Pascal Lafourcade, and Octavio Perez-Kempner. Protego: Efficient, revocable and auditable anonymous credentials with applications to hyperledger fabric. In INDOCRYPT, pages 249–271, 2022. [15] L´eo Ducas, Eike Kiltz, Tancr`ede Lepoint, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Peter Schwabe, Gregor Seiler, and Damien Stehl´e. CRYSTALS-Dilithium: A lattice-based digital signature scheme. IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, 2018(1):238–268, 2018. [16] Kai Fan, Shangyang Wang, Yanhui Ren, Hui Li, and Yintang Yang. MedBlock: Efficient and secure medical data sharing via blockchain. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(8):136:1–136:11, 2018. [17] Tomilayo Fatokun, Avishek Nag, and Sachin Sharma. Towards a blockchain assisted patient owned system for electronic health records. Electronics, 10(5), 2021. [18] Pierre-Alain Fouque, Jeffrey Hoffstein, Paul Kirchner, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Thomas Pornin, Thomas Prest, Thomas Ricosset, Gregor Seiler, William Whyte, and Zhenfei Zhang. FALCON: Fast-fourier lattice-based compact signatures over NTRU. https://falcon-sign.info/falcon.pdf. [19] Tomoki Fujitani, Keita Emura, and Kazumasa Omote. A privacypreserving enforced bill collection system using smart contracts. In AsiaJCIS, pages 51–60. IEEE, 2021. [20] Merlin George and Anu Mary Chacko. MediTrans - patient-centric interoperability through blockchain. International Journal of Network Management, 32(3), 2022. [21] Jens Groth. Short non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. In ASIACRYPT, pages 341–358, 2010. [22] Yiheng Liang. Identity verification and management of electronic health records with blockchain technology. In ICHI, pages 1–3. IEEE, 2019. [23] Joseph K. Liu, Victor K. Wei, and Duncan S. Wong. Linkable spontaneous anonymous group signature for ad hoc groups (extended abstract). In ACISP, pages 325–335, 2004. [24] Xingye Lu, Man Ho Au, and Zhenfei Zhang. Raptor: A practical latticebased (linkable) ring signature. In ACNS, pages 110–130, 2019. [25] Mohammad Moussa Madine, Ammar Ayman Battah, Ibrar Yaqoob, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Yousof Al-Hammadi, Sasa Pesic, and Samer Ellahham. Blockchain for giving patients control over their medical records. IEEE Access, 8:193102–193115, 2020. [26] Abdullah Al Omar, Md. Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Anirban Basu, Shinsaku Kiyomoto, and Mohammad Shahriar Rahman. Privacy-friendly platform for healthcare data in cloud based on blockchain environment. Future Gener. Comput. Syst., 95:511–521, 2019. [27] Bryan Parno, Jon Howell, Craig Gentry, and Mariana Raykova. Pinocchio: nearly practical verifiable computation. Communications of the ACM, 59(2):103–112, 2016. [28] Sen Qiao, Varun Madathil, and Kemafor Anyanwu. Integrating group signatures in complex decentralized marketplace transactions for improved buyer privacy. In Blockchain, pages 139–148. IEEE, 2022. [29] Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman. How to leak a secret. In ASIACRYPT, pages 552–565, 2001. [30] Alex Roehrs, Cristiano Andre da Costa, and Rodrigo da Rosa Righi. OmniPHR: A distributed architecture model to integrate personal health records. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 71:70–81, 2017. [31] Teppei Sato, Keita Emura, Tomoki Fujitani, and Kazumasa Omote. An anonymous trust-marking scheme on blockchain systems. IEEE Access, 9:108772–108781, 2021. [32] Kazuo Takaragi, Takashi Kubota, Sven Wohlgemuth, Katsuyuki Umezawa, and Hiroki Koyanagi. Secure revocation features in eKYC - privacy protection in central bank digital currency. IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, 106-A(3), 2023. [33] Qi Xia, Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Kwame Omono Asamoah, Jianbin Gao, Xiaojiang Du, and Mohsen Guizani. MeDShare: Trust-less medical data sharing among cloud service providers via blockchain. IEEE Access, 5:14757–14767, 2017. [34] Shouhuai Xu and Moti Yung. Accountable ring signatures: A smart card approach. In CARDIS, pages 271–286, 2004.

Anonymous, Accountable Contract Wallet System With Account Abstraction: Conclusion & References

The Offshore Pirate

The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE GRAND TETON MINE THE GRAND TETON MINE Away on the western border of Wyoming, in the all but inaccessible heart of the Rocky Mountains, three mighty brothers, “The Big Tetons,” look perpendicularly into the blue eye of Jenny’s Lake, lying at the bottom of the profound depression among the mountains called Jackson’s Hole. Bracing against one another for support, these remarkable peaks lift their granite spires from 12,000 to nearly 14,000 feet into the blue dome that arches the crest of the continent. Their sides, and especially those of their chief, the Grand Teton, are streaked with glaciers, which shine like silver trappings when the morning sun comes up above the wilderness of mountains stretching away eastward from the hole. When the first white men penetrated this wonderful region, and one of them bestowed his wife’s name upon Jenny’s Lake, they were intimidated by the Grand Teton. It made their flesh creep, accustomed though they were to rough scrambling among mountain gorges and on the brows of immense precipices, when they glanced up the face of the peak, where the cliffs fall, one below another, in a series of breathless descents, and imagined themselves clinging for dear life to those skyey battlements. But when, in 1872, Messrs. Stevenson and Langford finally reached the top of the Grand Teton—the only successful members of a party of nine practised climbers who had started together from the bottom—they found there a little rectangular enclosure, made by piling up rocks, six or seven feet across and three feet in height, bearing evidences of great age, and indicating that the red Indians had, for some unknown purpose, resorted to the summit of this tremendous peak long before the white men invaded their mountains. Yet neither the Indians nor the whites ever really conquered the Teton, for above the highest point that they attained rises a granite buttress, whose smooth vertical sides seemed to them to defy everything but wings. Winding across the sage-covered floor of Jackson’s Hole runs the Shoshone, or Snake River, which takes its rise from Jackson’s Lake at the northern end of the basin, and then, as if shrinking from the threatening brows of the Tetons, whose fall would block its progress, makes a détour of one hundred miles around the buttressed heights of the range before it finds a clear way across Idaho, and so on to the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. On a July morning, about a month after the visit of Dr. Max Syx to the assembled financiers in New York, a party of twenty horsemen, following a mountain-trail, arrived on the eastern margin of Jackson’s Hole, and pausing upon a commanding eminence, with exclamations of wonder, glanced across the great depression, where lay the shining coils of the Snake River, at the towering forms of the Tetons, whose ice-striped cliffs flashed lightnings in the sunshine. Even the impassive broncos that the party rode lifted their heads inquiringly, and snorted as if in equine astonishment at the magnificent spectacle. One familiar with the place would have noticed something, which, to his mind, would have seemed more surprising than the pageantry of the mountains in their morning sun-bath. Curling above one of the wild gorges that cut the lower slopes of the Tetons was a thick black smoke, which, when lifted by a passing breeze, obscured the precipices half-way to the summit of the peak. Had the Grand Teton become a volcano? Certainly no hunting or exploring party could make a smoke like that. But a word from the leader of the party of horsemen explained the mystery. “There is my mill, and the mine is underneath it.” The speaker was Dr. Syx, and his companions were members of the financial congress. When he quitted their presence in New York, with the promise to return within an hour for their reply, he had no doubt in his own mind what that reply would be. He knew they would accept his proposition, and they did. No time was then lost in communicating with the various governments, and arrangements were quickly perfected whereby, in case the inspection of Dr. Syx’s mine and its resources proved satisfactory, America and Europe should unite in adopting the new metal as the basis of their coinage. As soon as this stage in the negotiations was reached, it only remained to send a committee of financiers and metallurgists, in company with Dr. Syx, to the Rocky Mountains. They started under the doctor’s guidance, completing the last stage of their journey on horseback. “An inspection of the records at Washington,” Dr. Syx continued, addressing the horsemen, “will show that I have filed a claim covering ten acres of ground around the mouth of my mine. This was done as soon as I had discovered the metal. The filing of the claim and the subsequent proceedings which perfected my ownership attracted no attention, because everybody was thinking of the south pole and its gold-fields.” The party gathered closer around Dr. Syx and listened to his words with silent attention, while their horses rubbed noses and jingled their gold-mounted trappings. “As soon as I had legally protected myself,” he continued, “I employed a force of men, transported my machinery and material across the mountains, erected my furnaces, and opened the mine. I was safe from intrusion, and even from idle curiosity, for the reason I have just mentioned. In fact, so exclusive was the attraction of the new gold-fields that I had difficulty in obtaining workmen, and finally I sent to Africa and engaged negroes, whom I placed in charge of trustworthy foremen. Accordingly, with half a dozen exceptions, you will see only black men at the mine.” “And with their aid you have mined enough metal to supply the mints of the world?” asked President Boon. “Exactly so,” was the reply. “But I no longer employ the large force which I needed at first.” “How much metal have you on hand? I am aware that you have already answered this question during our preliminary negotiations, but I ask it again for the benefit of some members of our party who were not present then.” “I shall show you to-day,” said Dr. Syx, with his curious smile, “2500 tons of refined artemisium, stacked in rock-cut vaults under the Grand Teton.” “And you have dared to collect such inconceivable wealth in one place?” “You forget that it is not wealth until the people have learned to value it, and the governments have put their stamp upon it.” “True, but how did you arrive at the proper moment?” “Easily. I first ascertained that before the Antarctic discoveries the world contained altogether about 16,000 tons of gold, valued at $450,000 per ton, or $7,200,000,000 worth all told. Now my metal weighs, bulk for bulk, one-quarter as much as gold. It might be reckoned at the same intrinsic value per ton, but I have considered it preferable to take advantage of the smaller weight of the new metal, which permits us to make coins of the same size as the old ones, but only one-quarter as heavy, by giving to artemisium four times the value per ton that gold had. Thus only 4000 tons of the new metal are required to supply the place of the 16,000 tons of gold. The 2500 tons which I already have on hand are more than enough for coinage. The rest I can supply as fast as needed.” The party did not wait for further explanations. They were eager to see the wonderful mine and the store of treasure. Spurs were applied, and they galloped down the steep trail, forded the Snake River, and, skirting the shore of Jenny’s Lake, soon found themselves gazing up the headlong slopes and dizzy parapets of the Grand Teton. Dr. Syx led them by a steep ascent to the mouth of the canyon, above one of whose walls stood his mill, and where the “Champ! Champ!” of a powerful engine saluted their ears. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Garrett Putman Serviss (2005). The Moon Metal. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8199/pg8199-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE GRAND TETON MINE

PIGS—CATTLE—SHEEP—GOATS.

When Kurt Wilson, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, heard that his university was using a controversial online proctoring tool called Honorlock, he immediately wanted to learn more. The company, whose business has boomed during the pandemic, promises to ensure that remote students don’t cheat on exams through AI-powered software used by students that “monitors each student’s exam session and alerts a live, US-based test proctor if it detects any potential problems.” scan students’ faces to verify their identity, track specific phrases that their computer microphone captures, and even promises to search for and remove test questions that leak online. The software can One feature from Honorlock especially piqued Wilson’s interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls “seed sites” or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams. Wilson pored over a patent for the software to learn more, finding example sites listed. By looking for common code and the same test questions over the past year, Wilson eventually turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which . are still operating “It kind of became an obsession at one point,” said Wilson, who hasn’t tracked the honeypots in some months but was at one point checking for them daily. The sites Wilson found are bare bones. They have names like “ ” and “ .” They’re largely a catalog of thousands of apparent test questions that are sometimes bizarrely specific. “In which part of the digestive system does chemical digestion begin?” . gradepack.com quizlookup.com one post asks requests using “VSEPR theory to predict the molecular geometry around the carbon atom in formaldehyde, H2CO.” A multiple-choice question Click on the “show answer” button below any of the questions and you won’t get help but will be rewarded with a digital chiming noise and no answer. But visitors to the sites are having detailed information about their mouse movements and even typing transmitted to an Honorlock server. In the patent, , the company explains that its sites can track visitor information like IP addresses as evidence that a student was looking up answers on a secondary device. recently flagged, along with an Honorlock honeypot site, by student media at Arizona State University When the pandemic led to shuttered schools, demand for services like Honorlock skyrocketed as educators worried about whether students would be able to easily find answers online using devices that instructors didn’t know about. In for its software, Honorlock says, “[S]tudents have access to more and more electronic devices and it’s becoming harder for instructors to preserve academic integrity.” its online materials But some experts in the ethics of education worry techniques like honeypot websites simply go too far. “I can sum up this activity in one word,” said Sarah Eaton, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who studies academic integrity. “Entrapment.” Capturing Students’ Data While several companies offer services that tap into students’ webcams to track them, setting up fake sites to catch potential cheaters appears to be an innovation—one that crosses an ethical line for some experts. Before, students searching online for answers may simply have turned up nothing, while now, a potentially incriminating website will be there to tempt them. Ceceilia Parnther, an associate professor at St. John’s University who has studied remote proctoring, said the situation is ironic: Students “are being set up” through honeypots, she said, in an attempt to detect academic integrity violations, a practice that’s itself ethically questionable. “The face-to-face comparison is a teacher walking around with the answer key and putting it on the corner of each desk and then penalizing students if they look over at it,” she said. Honorlock is not directly mentioned on the sites Wilson found. But the sites list the same test questions as each other and include terms of service pages that mention the email address “privacy@hlprivacy.com.” The network activity of the pages, reviewed by The Markup, also shows data being sent to an Honorlock.com server. To understand precisely what data the honeypot sites might be tracking, The Markup inspected the page’s source code and network activity using Firefox’s developer tools for each of the still-operating websites noted by Wilson. We found that the sites captured data on a visitor’s type of device, where that visitor’s mouse was on the page, what they entered into a search bar, and details on what they clicked. Honorlock didn’t respond to a request for comment on the sites or to answer other questions about its privacy practices. It’s not clear how many students have been caught by the company’s honeypots. Honorlock with colleges like the University of Florida and University of Maryland, among several others. The company that, fueled by pandemic-era demand, it had raised $25 million in venture funding, building on round of $11.5 million. touts partnerships announced last year a previous Universities around the United States have now signed lucrative contracts with Honorlock, paying for the service. hundreds of thousands of dollars per year Some educators, meanwhile, are using similar tactics on their own, spreading false or traceable test answers online to catch students who look up answers. In one case, reported on , a professor acknowledged that a mathematics TA there had attempted to catch students cheating by adding a “unique marker” to a wrong solution posted online. by student media at Princeton The solution included “a reference to a Theorem” that was irrelevant to the answer. The Princetonian reported that several students of cheating based on their response to the question. were accused Michael Hotchkiss, a spokesperson for Princeton, declined to comment. Rethinking Exams Apart from honeypots, proctoring software’s rapid ascent has also given rise to other privacy and ethics concerns. Some students and educators argue the software leads to an , and others have raised technical concerns, pointing to face-detection software that fails to recognize the faces . anxiety-inducing testing environment of darker-skinned students The fear of an all-seeing proctor can have brutal side effects. One woman while taking a remote bar exam but continued with the test, afraid of being flagged for cheating. went into labor For educators, the draw of software that promises to automatically track down cheaters is clear. But some experts argue that it isn’t a problem that can or should be fixed by advances in technology to surveil students but by a rethinking of how those students are tested in the first place. Pedagogy ethicists like Parnther say this kind of software is backfiring by creating an environment where students are, by default, under suspicion. That mindset itself facilitates cheating, she says, by subtly suggesting to students that they might as well cheat because teachers expect them to anyway. “Students see that there’s an environment where it’s automatically assumed that they are not to be trusted,” Parnther said. Eaton proposes that educators should consider a more radical rethinking of testing, one that doesn’t rely on surveilling students. Punishing students for using their devices fundamentally goes against how learning works in the age of the internet, Eaton says, and the cat-and-mouse game of sussing out possible cheaters isn’t working. Moving to a better system might mean shifting to more oral or open-book exams, for example, which still demonstrate proficiency without the specter of simply Googling answers. There will always be some level of cheating on exams, Parnther argues, but the costs of cracking down on students is now coming at the expense of their education. “While we can’t ensure that no students will ever cheat, we can make it a norm that most students are just trying to do their best work,” she said. Written by: Colin Lecher Additional reporting by Surya Mattu. Feature Photo by on Sonja Langford Unsplash Also published here

Are Students Being Entrapped by Fake Test Answer Sites?

¿Están siendo atrapados los estudiantes por sitios de respuestas de exámenes falsos?

Les étudiants sont-ils piégés par de faux sites de réponses aux tests ?

क्या फर्जी टेस्ट आंसर साइट्स के जाल में फंस रहे हैं छात्र?

学生は偽のテスト回答サイトに罠にかけられていますか?

Os alunos estão sendo enganados por sites falsos de respostas para testes?

Học sinh có bị lôi kéo bởi các trang web trả lời bài kiểm tra giả mạo không?

学生是否被假考试答案网站所困？

The word "Nature” is a very broad term. It can be used to refer to very different things. For example, a predator hunting prey is a manifestation of nature, a volcano that is erupting (or not) is part of nature, the weather cycle, the movement of tectonic plates, the bio-diversity of the planet, the mineral resources, the landforms, the constellations, the stars, etc. are the kind of stuff that comes to mind when one refers to the term “nature”. Then there is nature that does not occur naturally. The artificial world created by man is also part of nature. The air conditioning system in my room, the electric power supply, the device on which I am writing down this post, and the internet where I hope to share my thoughts with you, are also part of nature. For the naturalist out there, the things made by man might not be as majestic and holy as the ones made by God. For the physicist, on the other hand, the things made by God and the things made by man are all made up of the same stuff. The predator and the keyboard are both made up of atoms, and the predator hunting the prey and the keyboard typing a letter are both manifestations of the same laws of nature. These laws of nature present a few mysteries as we dig deep  into the building blocks of matter and energy. These building blocks can be conveniently referred to as quanta. We will discuss these more in a while. Nature at the most basic “quantum” level Nature at the level of building blocks of matter and energy is very different from how we experience it in our everyday life. In our everyday life, we experience that a ball thrown towards a wall will hit the wall and bounce back. With practice and more experience, we can predict where the ball will hit on the wall. This determinism is the hallmark of the world around us, and it vanishes as we approach nature at the most basic level. A quantum ball thrown at a wall may or may not bounce back. It may just tunnel through the wall. Even if it does bounce back, there is absolutely no way to tell where it will hit the wall. This is a mystery of nature. Nature seeks to hide the information at the most fundamental level. Building blocks of matter and energy Let us look at the examples of the quantum ball discussed above --- the building blocks of matter and energy.  The building blocks of matter are atoms. They themselves are made up of  sub-atomic particles.  The most interesting one is the electron. The electrons in motion constitute the electric current we are all familiar with (It runs all our electrical and electronic appliances). A single electron fired towards a negatively charged plate is an example of a quantum ball hitting the wall. The  building blocks of energy (for our purpose today) are photons. These are a little hard to explain, but a working understanding is all we need to follow the argument. Look at the light source in your room. The light coming towards you basically consists of a large number of photons. The brighter the light is, the more abundant the photons are. If you reduce the intensity of light, for example, by placing a screen in front of you, you reduce the number of photons reaching you. The things we see are because of the photons reaching our eyes--- either directly emitted or scattered by those things (there is also a part of the vision that we do not actually see and merely cook up in our brains. That is the story of another mystery). Interactions between building blocks The interactions between the building blocks of matter and energy are simple. An atom can absorb a photon and go into the excited energy state. It can later emit that energy and come back to its preferred ground state. This simple energy exchange is at the heart of a technique that uniquely identifies all the elements in the universe and has been efficiently used by scientists for the last 200 years. The mystery The mystery involved in the simple energy exchange is that nature does not allow us to know . If there are a bunch of atoms, we can not know . Once an atom goes into the excited state, we do not know . We can not know in . We can not know when an atom will absorb the photon which one will absorb it when it will emit light to come back to the ground state which direction the emitted photon will go which atom it will excite next. The seemingly simple questions tend to be nature’s deeply guarded secrets. Nature’s answer to all the above questions is the following:  “ ”.  This randomness is the mystery of nature. Nature at the quantum level plays a dance between the atoms and the photons,  and we are never allowed to know the next step. This is one of nature’s most secretly guarded mystery, and a fundamental limitation to our knowledge. God will play a dice, and a random output will be selected Away from this deep level, nature does not have problems with us uncovering its secrets. It has let us hear that were uttered over a billion ago. It has very recently allowed us to look at of the universe. But it has issues if we ask which photon we will see next. If you find it a bit uncomfortable, then you are not alone. This state of affairs has troubled . the whispers of the universe the very early light some of our very best minds We remain unaware of the mystery because we seldom witness individual quantum events. We always experience such a large collection of these events happening so fast that the underlying dance and the mystery are completely masked. However, there are ways to explore and appreciate the mystery. A thought experiment Imagine yourself in a well-lit room with a few more people. You can all agree on everything you see in the room, including the color of the light. We take the color of light to be white to be more dramatic. Now here comes the first surprise. There are no white photons. The white color you see is your brain’s way of coping with an enormous number of differently colored photons.   “How enormous is that number?" can be easily googled or read . in another post Now let’s slow down things. Imagine that we reduce the intensity of light. This will lower the number of available photons, the room will become darker, and it will be difficult to distinguish colors. This is a limitation of our vision.  Our eyes are not designed to see the colors in the dark. The night vision receptors in our eyes are different from the ones we use in daylight. However, we can overcome this limitation by pretending that we have people with exceptionally good vision (after all, this is a thought experiment). If we keep on reducing the intensity of light, we will reach a point where only a few photons will be emitted by the source at a time (Single-photon sources are commercially available). At this point, it will be pitch dark, and the mystery will reveal itself. The source will still keep on emitting photons --- one at a time, but not all those photons will reach the eyes of the people in the room. Most of the time, they will report no light. Once in a while, someone in the room will report a little light spark. Every time this happens, he will be alone to report it. No one else in the room will see it. No two people will ever report the same spark. When you see the spark, no one else in the room will be able to see it, and when someone else sees it, you won’t be able to see it. A single photon may go anywhere in the room, but it can only be seen by a single individual (one receptor in one eye only). Moreover, the color of the spark will never be white simply because there are no white photons. Every time the light is emitted, it will have a different color may be red, green, or blue. Every time a person reports the light spark, he will report a different color. Every event now will be a different subjective experience. If you visualize the scenario discussed above, you can appreciate the quantum dance nature is playing. Now here is something to baffle your sense of reality. The quantum dance is going on right now in front of all of us. The scenario discussed in the thought experiment above is the reality that is going on right now in front of all of us. The part of the light that you are seeing right now can not be seen by any other person. The other person sees the other part of the light. The only thing is that we have so much light available that all subjective experiences coalesce into one objective reality. In our experiment, if we restore the light to its normal intensity, the quantum dance will disappear, and everyone will once again start reporting “white” light. Nature’s naked mystery The mystery has  its uses. The randomness and the indeterminism that follows may help us come up with a satisfactory free will. We might be able to settle the and our existence. We might come up . explanation for age-old debate regarding the emergence of life on the planet with new philosophies  in light of how nature behaves at the very fundamental level The random quantum dance going on in nature at the very basic level is a naked mystery. It is a mystery because nature never allows us to guess the next step, and it is naked as the dance is going on in front of all of us all the time. Thanks for reading the post. I hope you have enjoyed it. You can read more about quantum theory (in a non-technical description) . here

Nature's Naked Mystery

Misterio desnudo de la naturaleza

Le mystère nu de la nature

प्रकृति का नग्न रहस्य

自然の裸の謎

Mistério Nu da Natureza

Bí ẩn khỏa thân của thiên nhiên

大自然的赤裸之谜

Finally, we’ve invented the sci-fi technology of the future! And what do we do? Make tech support chatbots and check insurance claims… A few years ago, I was prepared for dazzling AI futurism, but the market continues to lag behind my expectations. I want fun AI. I want a Star Trek that spawns any food on command and a . replicator robot dog Personally, the first thing I did when I got access to deep-learning software was to create “Parm,” an algorithm that could identify types of cheese from pictures. It couldn’t tell gouda from sharp cheddar, but I loved it like it was my own baby. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any reason for Parm to exist. The backend alone would have cost tens of thousands to put in production, not to mention continuous maintenance requirements. And who was going to use it? Olive Garden? Ultimately, I sunset Parm to make space on my hard drive for icky medical imaging data of tumors. I might have shed a tear. The reality of AI today is that deep learning is too expensive and too gatekept to be fun. AI products have to justify their existence by generating a significant amount of income, so applications end up restricted to uninspiring corporate tasks. However, fun and useful AI does exist. Some examples are well-known, like , medical applications that screen for or , and the , but I’ve found a few extremely underreported use cases from my time in the industry that deserve far more attention, like Google’s Perfect Cookie AI covid cancer Wildlife Insights photo inventory these garden-building robots. I hope that these unique AI applications help you feel a little more optimistic about a glamourous, hi-tech future. I’ve also included some links to free and accessible machine learning software at the end, just in case you feel inspired to make a Parm of your own. 1. Using AI with Aerial Lasers to Spot Ancient, Giant Monster Shrines Selfishly, I put first because I worked on the technology behind it, but that doesn’t make it any less amazing. this one A team of Japanese researchers collected 3D scans of land around Nasca Pampa, Peru with lasers, generating an unapproachable amount of landform data. To tackle data processing tasks that would take humans decades, they trained an AI model to find intentional shapes in the mess of natural formations, specifically looking for a type of ancient art called biomorphic geoglyphs. The biomorphic geoglyphs are giant pictograms carved into the landscape by the ancient indigenous Nascan people. They depict detailed fire-breathing monsters and vengeful gods, typically ranging in size from 150 to 330 feet across. Hundreds of these beasts were hand-dug deep enough into the soil to still be visible after 2000 years of erosion, indicating that they must have been significant to the people who made them. Scientists suspect the figures were components of religious worship, but their purpose remains unknown. 2. Wanna put Skyscraper on the Hawaiian Coastline but Don’t Wanna Ruin the View? No Prob. My home city of Austin, Texas happens to also be the fastest growing city in the U.S.. I know the architects are doing their best to keep up, but their designs often don’t address the issues I need them to fix. However, this might change thanks to AI like . Their system for modeling infinite iterations of architectural features without technical know-how invites anyone to contribute their expertise to design more effective, inclusive spaces. Scout Scout is an easy-to-use data modeling AI tool that runs criteria like street width, sunlight, urban density, and even ocean views to generate optimized construction plans. Instead of one architectural firm running a handful of designs, now a whole team can collaborate to run thousands of models and select the best compromise to meet everyone’s needs. For example, a social worker could make recommendations on public services which could then be plugged into the model to ideate solutions for public spaces and transportation. Yes, I’m talking about the end of rush-hour traffic. 3. Giving the Mayflower a Do-over, This Time without a Single Colonizer Onboard Another project that took off from my work was the , an unmanned AI-driven boat charted to retrace Columbus’s course from Plymouth, UK to Plymouth, USA. This time, however, the boat won’t bring any white invaders. Instead, the boat will collect data about ocean health that can be used to combat threats like microplastics and chemical pollution. Mayflower Autonomous Ship The technology isn’t so different from what you might find in a self-driving car, but with an extra spatial dimension and an understanding of maritime traffic laws instead of stop signs. Not having humans onboard also frees up space for cargo — such as advanced computing equipment for tracking endangered whales — and offers huge potential for cheaper worldwide shipping. It’s not far from Hyperion’s iconic self-driving ! Windwagon 4. Beating You at Your Own Game without Ever Learning the Rules You might be familiar with AI beating humans at our own games such as , Jeopardy, , and perhaps most infuriating of all, , but I’ve noticed an astounding detail about many of these victories that remains totally underrated: these bots are often self-trained. They might get an overview of the game’s basic rules, but the rest of their education involves zero human input. chess Atari poker These AI models, like Google’s , teach themselves winning game strategy over millions of iterations. AlphaGo ran 30 million games in its first 40 days. H during that time, it independently recreated the same gameplay trends that humankind came up with starting at the game’s invention 2500 years ago. It matched the chronology of our progress refining game strategy, then, after it discovered the methods used by today’s greatest champions, it kept going. AlphaGo ere’s where it gets really crazy: It beat the 18-time world champion in 2016. Today, modern Go players are copying novel techniques invented by the machine and ushering in a new era of gameplay. It’s only a matter of time until this process, called reinforcement learning, is successfully applied beyond games, perhaps iterating on the best techniques to fly to Mars or evolve the human genome. Someday, one of these models will match our work and then eclipse it, taking us along on an accelerated fast-track to progress. 5. Beating Tomb Raiders to Find Long Lost Treasure (and Mummies) The Scythians of archaic Russia, Mongolia, and western China buried their dead in carefully-arranged “kurgan” mounds, filling the graves with valuables and, unfortunately, leaving visible piles of dirt aboveground. These circumstances have made the kurgans popular targets for tomb raiders since the 3rd century B.C. Modern tomb raiders got a new edge with the release of Google maps, which, for the first time, offered detailed topographical information to anyone with a laptop. The visible patterns of burial grounds were easy to spot in satellite images and nearly every ancient gravesite was pilfered by tech-savvy thieves. Only a few unbothered graves remain, but . A trained model sifts through satellite mapping data and tags potential gravesites, alerting research teams to get a move on when it finds a viable hit. This innovation has aided archeologists in discoveries of gold, glory, and even mummies like the , who was so beautifully preserved that her tattoos still remain intact. AI is helping archeologists locate and protect these sites before the bandits can strike Siberian Ice Maiden Feeling inspired? Machine learning and deep learning are still emerging technologies, but there are a few entry-level platforms that you can use to get started. No coding required. — my personal recommendation for total beginners Obviously.ai Google Cloud AutoML (former home of Parm) Watson Discovery Lite Apple’s Create ML

Spotting Monster Shrines and Finding Lost Treasures: 5 Genuinely Cool AI Projects

Leveraging Marqeta to Build a Payment Service in Spring Boot: A How-To Guide

Stories, News & Mentions about LANEFOUR

Lanefour’s Stories on HackerNoon