Dark Forest: Transparency on Blockchains with Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Brian Gu

Complete information games are games where every player has information about the game sequence, strategies, and payoffs throughout gameplay. Playing chess, for example, relies on knowing the location of every piece everywhere on the board. In an incomplete information game like Minecraft, you continually gain new information during gameplay.

Until very recently, incomplete information was nearly impossible on blockchains because every transaction and party is public. However, applied zero-knowledge cryptography on Ethereum has advanced greatly the past 18 months and is changing the transparency of blockchains.

In this episode we talk to Brian Gu, a creator of the new game Dark Forest. Dark Forest is a space-conquest game built on Ethereum where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate game moves on Ethereum without sharing information to other players about the moves. We discuss the technology behind Dark Forest and the possibilities of a potentially less transparent blockchain future.

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