Really interesting though i'm not sure I agree it changes the incentive structure of the competition - more players means you need to bid more aggressively to see any of the prize pool. It does make it harder to game their private validation dataset which is likely the goal here.
The real brilliance of numer.ai is that for not even the salary of one SF data scientist they've managed to employ an army of 'em.
Hey - I am one of the authors on that paper. One of the ideas behind relating bidding behavior to real life performance was that you don't want to be super aggressively, because if you overbid, that actually is worse for you. But obviously you are more likely to win if you bid more, so this gives incentive to be truthful.
Right now the plan for when we get tons of new users, is to be way more successful as a hedge fund and increase user payouts a ton. That way more people get a chance to earn money and good users get a chance to earn lots of money.
I may be misunderstanding something but if i'm bidding on something isn't it always to my advantage to have less bidders? Where are the positive network effects coming from?
Really interesting though i'm not sure I agree it changes the incentive structure of the competition - more players means you need to bid more aggressively to see any of the prize pool. It does make it harder to game their private validation dataset which is likely the goal here.
The real brilliance of numer.ai is that for not even the salary of one SF data scientist they've managed to employ an army of 'em.