Background The concept of sharding predates blockchains. Defined by some experts as “breaking up your big database into much smaller databases that share nothing,” it was intended to fix issues that arose as databases grew too large, such as increased response times when querying for data. It also helped organize data into categories. Sharding is still used for this purpose, …
History The concept of artificial intelligence has its origins in myth and legends. Ancient civilizations speculated about anthropomorphized creatures animated from various materials by magical means. These included the golems of Jewish folklore, which were made of clay or mud. Later, examples appeared from Greek, Egyptian and Chinese mythology of automatons, artificial men and animals made by craftsmen and engineers. …
Background The oldest and hardest goal in the blockchain gaming industry has been to develop a completely decentralized game, a persistent online world with no server. Early experiments such as Huntercoin and Motocoin proved epic, but were held back from the mainstream by installation difficulty, hardware requirements, and the inability to deal with artificial intelligence. The community has continued trying …
The Basics The best way to mine for cryptocurrency has been a topic of debate since the creation of the first altcoin. There are many variations of proof-of-work, wherein computers mine for coins by crunching numbers, while others advocate a proof-of-stake system in which new coins go to the holders. Some also incentivize things like recycling, folding proteins to cure …
Background Provable fairness is a concept originally pioneered by illegal gamblers in the dark ages of cryptocurrency, before blockchain analytics made it possible to trace transactions on blockchains like Bitcoin’s. The idea was simple: prove that online casinos aren’t cheating. The dark web has since receded to obscure blockchains such as Monero, but the idea of provable fairness lives on. …
Background Fog of war refers to the unknown variables in a situation. It has its origins in 19th century warfare, where a general had to maintain knowledge of enemy positions and the status of friendly soldiers. If one of your scouts failed to return with updates from the battlefield, and you didn’t send reinforcements, you could get caught in a …
Background There is a lot of history behind XAYA. It began in 2011 with Namecoin, to which core XAYA team members were major contributors. Forked off of Bitcoin, it took the concept of embedding critical data of the blockchain—despised by Bitcoin purists who view non-financial transactions as spam—and made it standard practice. The data was associated with strings of alphanumeric …