Buzzword

Photo by Shubham Dhage

Inspiration

Ok. So you're a tech startup. You don't have an idea but you need something BIG. You need something eye-catching, you need something insane.

It's ok. I'm here to help

Introduce Buzzword

Distributed computing, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Ethereum, Solidity, Artificial Intelligence, Cryptocurrency.

What does it do?

Machine learning.

And?

On the Blockchain.

Why?

...

How I built it

I used solidity to produce code that runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This code defines a smart contract that accepts data and performs a linear regression to train a model that receives input through the smart contract and returns predictions for user-provided input.

Challenges

I found out that Solidity is quite low-level. There is no floating point data type and there is no support for fixed-point numbers. I had to implement my own rational number data type.

Furthermore, there is no function to parse integers. I had to define that myself.

In addition to this, I had to implement a function to read a string defining a list of integers into an array of integers by defining my own custom format for representing arrays of integers.

Moreover, I found out that there is no automatic differentiation library for Solidity.

Alongside this, there is no machine-learning library for Solidity so I had to implement a function using a known analytical result for the value of the OLS estimate for a linear regression model.

The blockchain was not made for Machine Learning, I frequently ran into OOM (Out of memory) errors while testing my code locally.

The code takes up to a minute to train on a dataset containing just two data points.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I contend that I am the first person foolish enough to attempt Machine Learning on the blockchain and do it successfully for some definitions for successfully.