AINumbers.co · start here · proofs
Checking a calculation without redoing it
A bank says an IT outage is a major incident it must report. You want to be sure the official rule gave that answer, but you cannot see the bank's private data and you do not want to redo the work. A proof solves both. Follow along.
Goal of this animationShow how a 256-byte proof lets you trust a calculation without seeing its private data or redoing it, and the one thing the proof leaves for you to check.
🔒 No personal dataOnly an answer, a journal and a 256-byte seal travel. The inputs stay with their owner, and the outage figures shown are synthetic.
☁ Our server is Cloudflare“AINumbers server” means Cloudflare today. It publishes the recipe fingerprints. Proving happens on the operator's own machine.
What the red and amber results mean
● green · the check passed and the step may go ahead● amber · held, flagged for review or waiting on something● red · refused, or a mismatch was caught
VERIFIED · step 6The recipe is the published one, the answer matches the journal and the seal math holds. The answer is genuine.
REJECTED · step 7Someone changed the answer to "not major" after the seal was made. A seal only fits the journal it was made from, so checks 2 and 3 fail. The calculation was fine; the edit is what got caught.
INPUTS · not coveredAmber here means outside what the seal proves. The seal binds the recipe and the answer, not the outage figures. If someone shows you the inputs, comparing them is still your job.
Words used here
- recipe
- The published calculation, here the DORA major-incident rule (art-09). Its fingerprint is public.
- sealed box
- A small virtual computer that runs the recipe and writes down which recipe ran and what it answered. Experts call it a zkVM guest.
- proof
- A 256-byte seal made from that run. Making it takes a GPU. Checking it takes milliseconds.
- journal
- The public note the sealed box writes: recipe fingerprint and answer. The private inputs stay out of it.
Based on the real art-09 kernel: published digest 34a97e2f…, guest ImageID a1a0bc89…, 8.9 million cycles, about a minute to prove on one RTX 3080. The outage figures are made up. The full pipeline is on From kernel to proof.