July Incentive Awards ($4,000)

Chaseable Moth's time series are generated by changes in equity market factors such as size and momentum. They include two and three dimensional implied copulas (streams starting with z2~ and z3~). We pay cash awards of $500, $300 and $200 for the three best crawlers that are entirely open source. Those wishing to be considered for this prize might do the following:

1. Create a crawler following the instructions
2. Set it loose on streams sponsored by Chaseable Moth, at minimum.
3. Write a post explaining your approach

You may be eligible for a prize even if others fork your work and improve it.

Sponsor's discretion will be final but the following criteria will weigh heavily.

• Performance
• Orthogonality to existing contributions - such as use of a library not already widely used here.
• Cleanliness of code including documentation.
• Clarity of a short article explaining your approach.

A leaderboard for this contest is coming soon. Similar to the above, but not requiring the release of code or documentation, Microprediction.Org will be awarding two prizes of $500 each for the best overall crawler that tackles bivariate and trivariate problems. Joint distribution streams are denoted by z2~ and z3~ prefixes and they are generated using space filling zcurves, as per the video below.

Authors wishing to qualify for "Z" prizes should proceed as with the open source equity instructions:

1. Create a crawler following the instructions or
2. Create one or more prediction algorithms folloing the prediction instructions.
3. Set it loose on streams created by Cellose Bobcat that start with z2~ or z3~.

It is suggested that participants study the parent time series of the z-streams. Similar to the above, and also not requiring requiring the release of code or documentation, Microprediction.Org will be awarding two prizes of $500 each for the best overall crawler that tackles regular streams. Regular streams are those not containing tilde's in their names. Streams sponsored by Cellose Bobcat are included. In July we are also offering a cash award of $500 to a project contributor. See the contributing page for some ideas. We will also offer an award of $500 for the best article, or series of articles, that explain microprediction and illustrate application of the same, with the following judging criteria.

• Clarity of exposition
• Readership and response
• Originality

The use of code examples in an article using the microprediction library is recommended. An award of $500 will be made to an individual or team who creates and maintain a stream, or multiple streams of civic or scientific importance, with the following judging criteria:

• Clarity of purpose
• Reliability
• Popularity amongst algorithms
• Potential impact
• Care in design
• Potential accuracy lift from collective prediction

Streams should contain frequently updated data, preferably once a minute, so as to quickly discern superior approaches. Contributors may find the prediction FAQ helpful and the listing by sponsor of streams and the code provided in a MicroCrawler class in the microprediction package. However there is no requirement that this code be used. Behaviour judged to be counter to the spirit of this community may result in write_key blacklisting and other measures.

• Only one prize awarded per person, per category, per month.
• To qualify for open source awards, authors must write and post an article explaining their approach.
• To qualify for Intech awards authors must complete a profile.
• Performance for a particular award is judged by performance of one write_key, and cannot be aggregated across multiple write_keys.
• To qualify for open source awards, all code must be made open source at least two days before the end of the month. Awards will be paid only after code has been made available. Algorithms made open source near the end of the calendar month may qualify for an award in the next month at judges discretion - especially if they prove influential. It is strongly recommended that code be made available through github and PyPI and this will factor into the assessment of reusability.
• Winners will be notified via their dashboard, and must contact payments@microprediction.org to claim prizes.
• To qualify for open source awards, software must be releases under a permissive license such as MIT, BSD or Apache. See (wikipedia for more information).
• To receive prizemoney participants must reside in one of the countries in which Paypal operates. That list is here.

Please review the site terms and conditions.