Video: I can prove I’ve solved this Sudoku without revealing it

A Polylog video about zero-knowledge proofs, a mathematical magic trick.

This time, we joined forces with Tom Sláma who has his own YouTube channel dedicated to similar topics to Polylog’s. He helped out a lot. One thing I’m especially happy about is that he introduced us to the animation software Motion Canvas, which is the Manim alternative we’ve been missing for so long. Tom also wrote an excellent tutorial about Motion Canvas for Manim users.

Motion Canvas’ killer feature is the live preview – the animations get autoreloaded in a web GUI when you change something in your code, and you don’t need to wait for the whole thing to re-render. From a more technical standpoint, it has better thought-through semantics of how things are animated. Objects have properties such as scale, position, opacity, and you animate these in a uniform manner. You can also control them declaratively by assigning callbacks as values. For example, I can say that an arrow is always supposed to be pointing at some target object, and then I don’t have to remember to manually update the arrow. It’s also much clearer what happens if you declare a bunch of animations in advance and then play them. In Manim, the semantics of animations scheduled for the future are a mystery to me.

I’m thinking about making a whole video comparing Motion Canvas and Manim because it’s a great case study of software design. There are still some rough edges, but it’s an improvement on many axes.