Will a room-temperature, atmospheric pressure superconductor be discovered before 2030?
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9.6K
13K
2030
8%
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To qualify, the material must act as a superconductor above 0C.

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It's crazy how the probability of this market is kept unreasonably low basically because of one trader

bought Ṁ3,000 NO from 8% to 7%

@SimoneRomeo Sorry, but no it's not just one person. Look at Metaculus.

@Joshua 434 people bettering yes, 146 people betting no. Average yes bet is higher. I'm not talking about Metaculus, this market would be totally different if it wasn't for Chris

@SimoneRomeo That's not really how prediction markets work, only looking at how many people are betting yes or no does not give you the whole picture of what's going on. For example, imagine a user betting down to 30% in a coin toss market. Another user may come along, see value in betting up to 50%, make that bet and leave. Then the first user bets the market down to 30% again, another user bets it up to 50% and so on until the market gets to N people betting YES and a single user betting no. What's important is that the market has stabilized at around 50%, not how many people are in one side or the other. A YES bettor would buy NO if the market went over 50%, because what matters is the percentage. If you think this market is too low at 7% then buy yes, that's all there is to this.

@SimoneRomeo How would you know that nobody else would bet it down again to the same level if Chris hadn't bought as much?

(I.e. I know that I would buy far more no myself. I have to assume that's true for others as well.)

@TenShino yeah, this is how it would work in a fair world where everyone has the same amount of money to bet on what they prefer. I don't have any available mana to bet here, let alone to move the percentage.

@JonathanMannharti don't know, maybe you are right.

This probably won't be LK99, but superconductors have been getting better fast, and there's lots of investment into them.

@bdf “Superconductors are getting better fast“.

Superconductors have been seriously investigated since 80-110 years, with funding in the millions/y since ~40-50 years. (Rough estimates of investments are on the OoM of 100m-1B/y since the 80s.

This market closes in 6 years.

Could someone review the videos published by this YouTube page and tell me your opinion?

https://youtu.be/tH6vXYbkpSs?si=JALBnrcB124_MW6D

@SimoneRomeo my thoughts are CES should be ignored

bought Ṁ50 YES

The more I think about this, the more I think it's just a matter of timing before we find a superconductor. We are getting news about new discoveries from different scientific teams with different materials every six months. With AI expect it to speed up. Stakes are huge. If room temperature superconductors are possible, they'll be discovered this decade.

This may be relevant for this market. Global Room-Temperature Superconductivity in Graphite. https://doi.org/10.1002/qute.202300230

2 traders bought Ṁ20 YES
predicts YES

@SanghyeonSeo This paper's conclusion says:

"We have reported the first-ever observation of the global room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure."

Is this enough to resolve this market?

predicts NO

@GraceKind Hope not. Bet it won't reproduce. Claims of room temperature superconductivity are not that rare, and have been wrong every time so far. Wonder how many more false alarms we'll have whilst this market is open.

hey maybe Schon's been cooking recently ya never know!

bought Ṁ15 YES at 7%
bought Ṁ0 of YES

FYI I made this market to try and help draw out the crux of RTAP superconductors being technically infeasible as opposed to questions around near term technical progress (and/or AI acceleration), events in the current news cycle.

/CameronHolmes/will-we-get-a-room-temperature-ambi

predicts NO

@CameronHolmes FYI you can link the market more prettily (without a full graph embed) by typing "%" and then searching for the market.

As for your market, I wish there were better incentives for long-term markets! I'll think about it, but it's hard to justify betting when it will functionally behave like a stock. It's unfortunate there aren't good solutions to this problem currently.

predicts YES

@chrisjbillington Thank you, TIL. Yeah it's a shame the timing dynamics strongly skew those markets in favour of people believing in an early resolution, but I still wanted something that was (hopefully) less sensitive to current news / views on rapid AI-driven tech acceleration.

In hindsight I should have made it RTAP SC >2030 (or 2040) but <2100 to help reduce the timing bias, it would still let people express the same views in conjunction with the other available markets. Wouldn't help with volumes but might have reduced the bias, either way I don't think I can justify yet another market on this now.

bought Ṁ10 of YES

Here is the report from the Sukbae Lee (L in LK99 presentation).

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/korean-lk99-variant-superconductor-partial-update-highlights.html

The class of room temperature and room pressure superconductors is real.

He and other researchers have formed a corporation and the success of the company and its patents is the priority.

IBM is the first company to start discussions.

Sukbae Lee believes the China groups have successfully reproduced the sample.

They have a video detecting zero resistance.

Sukbae Lee and his team are confident

APL materials review process : Ongoing

Patent registration: Ongoing

Why no samples and data? -> We are a corporation. Patent.

We are going to be proved by other researchers

There are still instabilities and other issues to be worked through.

There are currently limitations around a narrow range of magnetic fields.

bought Ṁ100 of NO

Hope I lose this bet big time, because room-temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors would be awesome.

bought Ṁ1,000 NO at 7%

Semi-relevant arbitration opportunity given that superconductivity is the most likely candidate off the top of my head

boughtṀ71YES

@oui your bot is misbehaving

bought Ṁ250 of NO

im not falling for this one again

bought Ṁ100 of YES

@StanRunge you are failing for the oposite.

Just because all the lk99 stuff is bullshit doesn't mean that someone else can't find a legitimate superconductor in the next 6 years especially since AI stuff will help.

I mean maybe Google will make alphasuperconductor or something.

I don't think it's that likely but at least 10-15%

predicts YES

@VictorLevoso Agreed, while condensed matter research is disanalogous with protein folding in many ways it still seems like a possible application of narrow AI to find candidates.

Assuming a RTAP SC is practical with current tech and this is basically a huge search problem then I have to guess we find it by 2040. So then it's just a matter of more aggressive AI timelines and what you think of that initial assumption.

With abundance of compute and algorithmic advancement I expect I modest chunk of that search space gets covered by 2030.

predicts YES

@VictorLevoso actually they have already created it, this is precisely the purpose of the GNoME tool. Give it one or two years to refine the algorithm plus another year to actually synthesize the material in lab, I'd guess that by the end of 2026, we'll get our first superconductor.

https://time.com/6340681/deepmind-gnome-ai-materials/

bought Ṁ200 of YES

@StanRunge changed my mind. i will be falling for this one again

predicts YES

@StanRunge 😂😂😂

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