
A Field Guide to zkSNARKs Part I: A Primer on Computation - madrafi
https://write.as/knowledgeprover/zero-knowledge-proof-systems-a-primer
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ahelwer
I wanted to read this blog post but it seems uncertain about its intended
audience. It goes over a whole bunch of basics like turing machines, circuits,
decidable languages, NP, etc. - but too briefly for people unfamiliar with
those concepts to understand, and not briefly enough to keep the attention of
everyone else. Then we jump to using something called the Hadamard component-
wise product which is not defined. I'm sure there's a good post here but it
could use trimming in some places and expansion in others.

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JadeNB
> Then we jump to using something called the Hadamard component-wise product
> which is not defined.

Aside from the 'Hadamard', which is just the name of a mathematician who used
it, it's pretty self documenting, no? Multiply two vectors of the same size by
multiplying corresponding components. (This can be viewed as an intermediate,
coordinate-dependent step in the computation of the coordinate-independent dot
product—although that doesn't seem to be how it's used here.)

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lavrov
Didn’t read the entire post but I think the characterization of PCP’s is a bit
off - some SNARK constructions and STARKs both use PCP’s - using a linear PCP
vs a PCP doesn’t impact transparency or proof size, that’s more a function of
the commitment scheme

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Ar-Curunir
Yeah, it's a relatively good high level post about SNARKs, but there's some
confusion about the role of PCPs in SNARKs.

(all SNARKs have some probabilistic checking at the core; that's how you get
succinctness)

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madrafi
Author here, I did gloss over PCPs certainly, and agree that SNARKs also use
PCPs and I might have made the terrible conclusion about proof sizes. Will
push an update soon ! thanks for taking the time.

