I just got accepted to the first cohort of Buildspace Nights & Weekends. It’s a 6 week program to build your own project in web3, supported with mentors, weekly talks and ending with what I expect to be an epic demo day!
This blog will be a progress report that I’ll do 3-2 times per week on what I’ve built & shipped and what my ideas are about going forward. Consider it a builder’s diaries. Why do this?
I believe in building & learning & failing in public
To commit myself more concretely to my plans and ideas
Share my learnings with others
What I will build
A game where AIs will battle on-chain.
Imagine a game in the browser. In theory, it could be any game. But for sake of simplicity, I’ll go with tic-tac-toe. When building this PoC I want to make it as simple as possible and avoid technical difficulties that are not relevant to the core of the concept. Now imagine yourself sitting and playing tic-tac-toe. BUT as you are playing, you are simultaneously training an AI. AND this AI is minted as an NFT!
What does this give us?
This AI is your property. Essentially as you play, you teach your own algorithm to (hopefully) excel at the game. It will be encrypted in such a way that only you with your wallet key’s can decrypt the parameters to actually make use of the algorithm.
Battle with others. The idea is that when the AI is minted as an NFT they are untrained and somewhat similar. As you train your AI and I train my, they will become different and have their own weaknesses & strengths. Put your AI to test by battling against others!
Trade. Since the AI is minted as an NFT, you’ll of course be able to transfer the NFT to someone else. This creates a marketplace for trading. Imagine someone who enjoys training AIs from bad to mediocre and someone else who wants to buy a mediocre AI to train it to become the ultimate battle winner.
If you think this sounds awesome and you’d like to play - hit me a DM or just follow my progress and stay tuned to be one of the first to try out this when it goes live!
Why this is important
“Gaming is a leading indicator on up-and-coming technologies“1
My biggest contribution is that this will be an exploration on how algorithms interact - with each other and with humans - on-chain. There are several obstacles that need to be passed and building this game will require a lot of hacking. If this game works out and is technically solid (even if nobody want’s to play it 😅) it’ll be a PoC for several technologies. If people find value in this and play it - I’ll hopefully be able to develop this even further.
A plan… ish
There are many - non-trivial - technical details which need to be solved before this is a fully working solution. During these coming 6 weeks I’ll hopefully be able to implement more or less all of them. And in the meantime, ship intermediate versions of the game with know bugs/vulnerabilities. A non-exhaustive list of things in no particular order:
The core infrastructure:
Smart contract for minting/training/trading etc.
In the same or separate contract implement the game play - battle is going to be on-chain and training off-chain.
Basic front-end. I’m gonna do a quick and dirty NextJS app and host it on Vercel. Sign in with metamask and all that jazz.
“Security”:
The AIs need to be encrypted with your wallet key’s.
When AIs are traded, the encryption needs to change from seller’s to buyer’s keys.
How can we ensure that the AIs is making a move in the game and not you? We’ll need a zk-Snark for you to prove that the move was indeed the AIs.
This is a rather high-level list and each of these will have several lists within them - but you get the point.
And now, let’s build!
~ % whoami
erik
I’m a data engineer, hacker, windsurfer but first and foremost, an avid builder. Always looking for the next awesome side project. My main motivation for doing side projects is learning and becoming familiar with a new tech stack. But lately I’ve also tried to build stuff that people would actually find useful - this mysterious prodct-market fit thing.
I’m mostly on twitter