Yantrakaal

Once the basic architecture or the big picture of the blockchain ecosystem -- as explained in Part I of this article -- is understood, we can now move into the nuts-and-bolts of actually building a software application. To do so, we need the following four pieces : An Ether wallet - to store Ether and pay it out when necessary A Solidity development environment or IDE to build contracts A connection service provider that allows client software to connect to the Ethereum network A platform or IDE to build a client software that can execute transactions against Solidity contracts residing on the blockchain 1. The Ether Wallet - MetaMask An ether wallet is a Solidity contract with an address ( think Bank Account Number)  and a private-key (think Specimen Signature in a Bank Account) that resides on the blockchain. What is commonly understood as an ether wallet is actually a client application that can execute payment transactions from the Solidity wallet-contract. So we will refer to...

With Bitcoin and cryptofinance in the news, blockchain programming has suddenly become very important but most people - including many programmers - do not have a clear idea on how to write a program on the blockchain. This article is not about theoretical concepts like Merkle Trees and SHA256 Hash. It is about how to write an application that creates, reads, updates and deletes a data record from a 'database' on the blockchain. A CRUD application. If you are impressed by Powerpoint slides in Zoom Webinars, you may skip this article, but if you are a programmer -- professionals or hobbyist -- do read on. You will end up writing your first blockchain application without too much sweat. I first came across Bitcoins as currency in the virtual world of Second Life and wrote about " Bitcoins - my first look at a new currency " in 2013 and then I struggled to wrap my head around this fantastic concept for almost a year until I reached a point where I could write " Bitc...

  Located this coin among others in a locker being cleaned out. Charanpreet Singh helped me decode the text that reads 19 Zarb Murshidabad and Badshah Alam Shah 1204. Used this information to get some more information from an auction site. Deepawali acquisition!

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of years you would know for sure that things are happening in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Rapid developments in the area of artificial neural networks has spawned a brood of useful architectures - CNN, RNN, GAN - that have been used to solve a range of very interesting problems. These include, among others control of autonomous or self driving vehicles identifying visual elements in a scenery recognising faces or connecting bio-metrics to individual identities automatic translation from one language to another generating text and visual content that is indistinguishable from that generated by human intellect. While these applications have created considerable excitement both in the technical as well as in the commercial community, there has been an undercurrent of resentment among certain people against what they view as ethical issues that are yet to be unresolved.  To understand what is at stake let us consider...

Abstract : Information, or rather information technology, is the basis of the digital economy that we live in but is there something more fundamental to information that goes beyond the thousands of  digital computers that we come in touch with in our daily lives? This article explores how information could be the basis of the material world itself, which in turn is merely a simulation generated by the proces sing of information. To do so we note that in social media and in Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) users live in a world that is not what it seems to be.  This leads to the question whether the world that we see around us is really real, or as described in Sankar’s Vedanta and the movie Matrix, is a simulation. This simulation hypothesis is explored further on the basis of Brian Whitworths paper on the feasibility of the world  being an illusion. Finally we demonstrate how this illusory world can be created purely on the basis of information thr...

That "information is power" is a statement that is often made both figuratively and loosely, but can it be literally true? Is it possible to find links between information and the stuff that they refer to in physics text books? Obviously the information that you read in the newspaper cannot be easily related to the power that causes a light bulb to glow. To simplify both sides of the equivalence, or analogy, and see if we can find a real link between the two, we begin with .... ( read on )