History of Proof of Excellence and new possibility — Decentralized Game
The History Timeline of Proof of Excellence (PoE)
August 19th, 2012, Sunny King, Scott Nadal
https://www.peercoin.net/whitepapers/peercoin-paper.pdf
During our research we have also discovered a third possibility besides proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, which we termed proof-of-excellence. Under this system typically a tournament is held periodically to mint coins based on the performance of the tournament participants, mimicking the prizes of real-life tournaments. Although this system tends to consume energy as well when artificial intelligence excels at the game involved, we still found the concept interesting even under such situation as it provides a somewhat intelligent form of energy consumption.
August 2013, Vitalik Buterin, Sunny King
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:06 pm]:also, as far as proofs go, in the ppcoin paper you mentioned a third possibility
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:06 pm]:just past several weeks saw at least three copies released in china and went into speculative frenzy
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:06 pm]:“proof of excellence”
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:06 pm]:could you elaborate a bit more on that idea?
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:08 pm]:it’s a concept although there is no concrete designs around this concept
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:09 pm]:it’s based on that a tournament result of some games is difficult to forge
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:09 pm]:for example you cannot go to a tennis tournament to win prizes without having some serious skills
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:10 pm]:so a coin might have some kind of internal AI tournament?
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:10 pm]:best programmers win and get to mine some blocks
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:10 pm]:so it’s a possible candidate to replace the functions of proof-of-work
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:11 pm]:Yeah that’s the idea
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:12 pm]:It doesn’t have to be AI it can be done between humans as well
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:13 pm]:true
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:13 pm]:although coins don’t really have a way of distinguishing between human players and bots
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:14 pm]:the only challenge I know of that humans are better at is Go
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:14 pm]:right and most games AI can play better than human
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:15 pm]:I actually looked at Go and I think even for that the network would be dominated by bots
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:15 pm]:because there is already very good Go AI and very few pro level Go players
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:15 pm]:yeah
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:16 pm]:and ideally you do want the system to be somewhat egalitarian
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:16 pm]:as otherwise one party might get 51%
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:16 pm]:eg. whoever has the best go algorithm
Vitalik Buterin [08|Aug 10:17 pm]:that’s probably the hard part about implementingit
Sunny King [08|Aug 10:17 pm]:that’s one of its issues because its distribution is a lot more concentrated than proof-of-work
December 2013, lowkey1979
https://talk.peercoin.net/t/proof-of-excellence-anyone-have-details/1176
Ok, see that sounds VERY cool, and I love all the things left to experiment with in cryptocoins that we haven’t even begun to try out. So anyway, we have another form of proof! I was rereading the paper today and I really want to know now. My question is, does anyone have anything more on this? Another paper or post by Sunny anywhere? More to the point, how precisely would holding a tournament between some gameplaying AI’s also contribute to integrity of the blockchain?
Dec 20, 2017 Cibola
https://medium.com/@rogue.hogan/a-case-for-proof-of-excellence-978d19c869ac
Problems could be suggested to “make a market” where anyone can participate in 1 or n tournaments. The market would describe the problem, expected outcome and verification process. Rewards would be calculated by based on predicted complexity, elapsed time, energy consumed and quality of answer. Presumably the best, fastest, cheapest answer wins.
Mar 29, 2018 Cibola
https://medium.com/@rogue.hogan/proof-of-excellence-in-cryptocurrency-1a1fd7d169e3
Introducing a new complex, consensus model such as PoE will be difficult but perhaps the idea of a dual purpose PoW could be a stepping stone if the results from the primecoin project are an indicator.
The new possibility — Decentralized Game
For me, PoE is still a very interesting idea to explore further. In the past, the main focus is on the blockchain consensus side. One key question asked by lowkey1979 in 2013 is
how precisely would holding a tournament between some game playing AIs also contribute to integrity of the blockchain?
What if the answer is NO. No, holding a tournament between game playing AIs is hard (or not economical) to be part of the blockchain backbone. Once we decouple blockchain consensus and PoE, the new possibilities appear — Decentralized Game.
After almost 10 years passed, many Proof of X are running on the main stream blockchains already. A PoE new blockchain / coin may not even be needed, but PoE tokens could probably prosper.
Nowadays, thanks to the development of smart contract, most developers would not choose to make a new chain from scratch, but rather develop Dapps based existing blockchain. Just like high speed internet made Tiktok possible, high speed blockchains open a new door for fully decentralized games (not GameFi).
I’m excited about this topic, and will share more of my thoughts in the future. Share your ideas at the comment section please.
