Introduction to SNARK

Abstract

A computer system for any specific task (perhaps running an airline booking scheme or looking after the welfare of a patient in the intensive care unit of a hospital) is designed as a holarchy, and consists of several ‘layers’. At the bottom, there are the individual NAND gates and their connections, which are used to form networks capable of arithmetic and information storage. This layer is called the ‘hardware’ of the system. Left to itself, the hardware can do no useful work, any more than a non-programmable hand calculator can solve any problem entirely on its own. The hardware of a computer needs to be driven by a sequence of instructions, each one of which represents a simple step in the execution of the present task. The collection of instructions for a complete job is called a program. Programs generally are referred to as software, and form the next layer, above the hardware, in the system hierarchy.