The Hilbert Program

Over the next month, Protocol Improvement Grant (PIG 🐷) and Protocol Orienteering Grant (POG 🧭) teams are hosting research meetings on their projects. These meetings give grantees an opportunity to showcase their experiments, collect feedback, and explore future avenues for their work.

We have six weeks remaining in this season's formal program – final PIG and POG presentations will be live in September, along with a handful of written case studies. Stay tuned!

Between wildfires, the Olympics, and tumultuous politics, the importance of protocols is on full display this summer. Like advances in mathematics, economics, or physics, contributions to protocol science have the potential to unlock value in all kinds of places.

Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. Venkat and others have started posting important, unsolved problems in the forum under the tag protocol-hilbert.

For example:

1. Hardened-Commons Protocol for Indigenous Knowledge Integration (Link): How do you systematically draw on indigenous knowledge and integrate it into modern knowledge under the operating assumption that there is in fact one coherent epistemology to be gradually improved and that both of the main sources – modern science, and indigenous knowledge – require their own quality control and can’t be taken at face value?

2. The Questions of Protocol Scales (Link): As systems and protocols increasingly operate at scales beyond human perception and cognition, how can we design protocols that remain effective, comprehensible, and manageable across all relevant dimensions of scale (temporal, spatial, complexity, etc.) while maintaining human agency and understanding?

“… he who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks for the most part in vain.”

-David Hilbert

Here's a short list of recent protocol topics in the media:

• Group decision-making in a hunter-gatherer band of the Ju/’hoansi, a people that lives in the Kalahari Desert.

• A weakness discovered in the RADIUS protocol, which is used in networks almost everywhere.

• An air travel design guidebook, which contains protocol patterns ranging from security theaters to loading aircraft to lounge layouts.

• The Codex Alimentarius Commission.

You can find more articles in the Protocol Watch channel on the forum.