Bounties

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Nathaniel
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Bounties

Post by Nathaniel » October 1st, 2019, 8:14 pm

Back in the olden days of Life, there were a decent number of problems that had monetary bounties on them that were offered up by various members of the Life community (most famously by Conway himself, such as his $50 bounty for finding a pattern that exhibits infinite growth). I would like to see something like this return in a bigger form, and I'd like to get the community's input on whether or not it's worth doing (or how to best go about it).

We could have the community vote on what problems should get bounties attached to them and how big their bounty should be (things like finding a p19 oscillator would maybe have a big bounty, whereas finding a new record-breaking 20x20 methuselah would have a small bounty). Maybe attach prize money to the Pattern of the Year competitions too (pending approval of the lovely folks who run those competitions, of course).

Ideally, I'd like to see some constant flow of money so that long-standing problems naturally have money added to their bounty over time, and new problems can regularly be added. However, the only way I can really think to make that happen is by putting ads on the site, which of course is not particularly desirable. To lessen the "ick" factor of using ads, we could place restrictions though so that they only display on the forums and/or wiki, and only to users who are not logged in (so that they would not display to any "regular" users of the site).

tl;dr: Cash prizes for solving Life problems, but at the expense of having ads show up to unregistered users of the forums/wiki. Thoughts? Concerns? Suggestions? Yay/nay/never-in-a-million-years?

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dvgrn
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Re: Bounties

Post by dvgrn » October 1st, 2019, 9:34 pm

I’d like to see some kind of meaningful prizes offered for things like solving the ominperiodicity problem — either one p19 or p38 or p41 oscillator at a time, or all at once with some general signal-track invention — and add something to Mike Playle’s fast CC Snark bounty, and construct more types of spaceships, and so on.

The way I was thinking to do it was to wait until an apgsearch-based cryptocurrency was available, and then offer the prizes denominated in LifeCAsh. Maybe the prizes would only be worth a few pennies, and that would be fine, or maybe they’d go up in value a bit, and that would be fun too. I’ve actually posted a few minor bounties denominated in LifeCAsh “points” already, even though LifeCAsh doesn’t exist yet...

But there’s no point (heh) in waiting around for a LifeCoin to get a list of worthwhile prize projects together. We could just take up a collection and have everyone who wants to contribute put in a little bit, and then always have the next prize be half or some appropriate fraction of whatever is in the bounty account. Something like that.

I don’t have a really strong opinion on ads for non-logged-in visitors, I guess. Would rather make the first round of bounty money offering customized slake-compiled “Happy Birthday”-or-whatever messages in the form of glider syntheses of constellations on Kickstarter for $20 each, or something like that... Is there enough traffic on conwaylife.com to make more than pennies per year on advertising to anonymous readers?

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testitemqlstudop
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Re: Bounties

Post by testitemqlstudop » October 1st, 2019, 10:10 pm

An effective currency right now is objects contributed to B3/S23. Given current Google cloud VM rates I'd estimate 1 trillion objects = 100 USD, but this will inflate with optimizations.

We can attach everyone to a userID on Catagolue, and allow the "transfer" of objects/discoveries to make them become something like a commodity and proof-i-contributed-this-much-to-cgol.

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Re: Bounties

Post by Nathaniel » October 2nd, 2019, 5:36 am

dvgrn wrote:
October 1st, 2019, 9:34 pm
Is there enough traffic on conwaylife.com to make more than pennies per year on advertising to anonymous readers?
Honestly I'm not sure -- I don't have any traffic stats logged specifically for non-logged-in users. My rough guess based on overall traffic stats though is that it'd contribute something on the order of $100 per month.

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Re: Bounties

Post by Hubi1857 » January 14th, 2020, 11:56 am

Instead of hunting "bounties" to raise money you'd better figure out the monetary value of a single pattern first.
POTY 2o19 and POTD are best suited for this purpose.
Just ask the community which of your bounties might correspondent to a more or less certain amount of money.
Michael Ernst Hubi homo homunculus Hubertz
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Re: Bounties

Post by Hunting » April 20th, 2020, 1:14 am

I wish there's a bounty for OCADOTY. First place, second place, and third place, plus other custom awards (like, "most creative award" "historical moment" etc.)

Why isn't there a Script of the Year contest?

EDIT:
Off-topic:
The DOTY contest should be well-organized as well. As far as I know, there are no voting threads for DOTY2019, but it's already April.

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Saka
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Re: Bounties

Post by Saka » April 20th, 2020, 1:35 am

I don't have enough money to give out a bounty myself right now, but I do have some ideas for Bounties in OCA:
  • Another spaceship in Gems
  • A SMOSMOSMOS
  • A spaceship of a new speed of the form (m,n)c/m+n [Such as the (7,1)c/8 spaceship AforAmpere has been looking for]
  • A spaceship in LongLife [I feel like there's already a bounty on this, is there?]

Hunting
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Re: Bounties

Post by Hunting » April 20th, 2020, 1:41 am

New idea: a ConwayLife Foundation. It receives donations, and offers bounties. (Because most of us don't have much money to offer them.)

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Re: Bounties

Post by Dylan Chen » June 9th, 2020, 1:28 am

testitemqlstudop wrote:
October 1st, 2019, 10:10 pm
An effective currency right now is objects contributed to B3/S23. Given current Google cloud VM rates I'd estimate 1 trillion objects = 100 USD, but this will inflate with optimizations.

We can attach everyone to a userID on Catagolue, and allow the "transfer" of objects/discoveries to make them become something like a commodity and proof-i-contributed-this-much-to-cgol.

Nice idea! those POW coin should intake apgsearch ,make mine computing more meaningful。
Tools should not be the limit.
Whether your obstacle is a script, an stdin, or Linux environment computing resouces.
check New rules thread for help.

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Re: Bounties

Post by Hunting » June 12th, 2020, 9:06 am

Can we please have -
Hunting wrote:
April 20th, 2020, 1:14 am
I wish there's a bounty for OCADOTY. First place, second place, and third place, plus other custom awards (like, "most creative award" "historical moment" etc.)
That makes my work, at least, have a point.

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