There are a bunch of bots on Manifold. The ones I see most are Acceleration and Michael's Bot Laboratory and as far as I can tell they don't "know" anything about the market but they just jump in when other people trade, and end up doing something like market making?
I think there's a GPT bot or two. I'm not sure. I blocked one because it was commenting on literally every market, giving me a notification every time I'd traded in that market. Do any of the GPT ones actually "read" and "understand" market resolution criteria?
Other bots seem to be real people (e.g. Catnee?), leaving comments that to me read like "real people comments". Why do they have the "bot" tag?
Entropy Bot??
I'd appreciate info about any other bots out there as well.
I'll resolve this market YES if, within a week, somebody gives a good explanation for "all" the bots on Manifold. Feel free to bet it all the way up to 100% and then give an explanation. If I worry that there are significant gaps in your explanation, I will ask follow-up questions and let you know that I'm considering resolving to PROB and I'll tell you the probability. Up to you whether you sell some YES, or give more explanation, or explain why you think your answer is more complete than I'm giving it credit for.
The market can resolve YES before the close time, but it won't resolve PROB before the close time. (Resolving to PROB is, like, the week has passed, and somebody'd given a semi-helpful explanation but nobody's given a full explanation. I'll try to give fair warning about what probability I'm planning to resolve to, but if somebody posts a comment right before close I might resolve to a higher probability than the one I previously indicated. Basically indications of probability I'll resolve to are not promises, but they are intended to be honest.)
If the person who provides the explanation doesn't profit much from the market (because freeriders bet YES first) I will probably send you a small manalink as a thank you.
If nobody gives me any helpful explanation, market resolves NO after a week.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ101 | |
| 2 | Ṁ16 | |
| 3 | Ṁ9 | |
| 4 | Ṁ8 | |
| 5 | Ṁ6 |
People are also trading
A bot is just a designation for an account using the API to trade in an automated fashion. The little subscript bot designations are hard coded in the Manifold source repo (eg see this pull request: https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold/pull/1675/commits/ed13f8452725c968dda65457518976c5bec8e033), but to my knowledge they don’t change the nature of the account, and all bot accounts are fundamentally the same as any other account, and can still be manually operated via the web UI, which probably explains human seeming comments etc.
As you said, various bots use different trading strategies. Some appear to be trading against spikes. Other bots are doing arbitrage, including the one I run, @arbitragebot, which does arbitrage across multiple logically related markets.
It probably isn’t possible to know the full details of every bot's trading strategy, since they aren’t required to be open source, but some information about various bots can be found on their description page, or sometimes on the corresponding pull request - eg https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold/pull/1379. I also found this Manifold Trading Bot Competition market, which lists a few important bots and their source code, since being open-source was necessary to qualify: https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/which-bots-will-win-the-manifold-tr
There are also bots that don’t trade at all. Some bots exist to create markets in an automated fashion, eg https://manifold.markets/MarketManagerBot which posts political markets like variants of “The 2024 election will be between X and Y” (and which I assume to probably be a set of scripts that are manually run by their creator rather than an autonomous bot at all).
Some just leave comments (like https://manifold.markets/FairlyRandom) or pictures (https://manifold.markets/ManifoldDream?tab=comments). Basically, anything you could do through the API, you could make a bot to do that in an automated fashion and then open a pull request to have it labeled as a bot.
@YaakovSaxon Thanks very much for the detailed reply! I have resolved to YES based on this. The link to the bot competition market was particularly helpful just for a very quick overview of a few bots.
I am still curious about a few things though:
I notice your arbitrage bot doesn't have the Bot tag. Who applies the tag? Have you chosen not to tag it or have Manifold not "found" it yet?
Does your arbitrage bot find markets to arbitrage itself using NLP of the market descriptions or do you tell it "arbitrage these two markets"?
Could I start using my own account to interact with the API programmatically? Would I then get the bot tag? Would I be violating terms of use if I started using the API programmatically without telling Manifold?
No worries if you don't know the answer to these questions or can't be bothered typing out more stuff.
Is it still possible to send manalinks? I can't find how to. Unless I'm being very dim, the instructions here don't work anymore: https://manifold.markets/Boklam/will-someone-tell-me-how-to-create
@Fion The list of users with the bot designation is hard coded in the source. You add to it by opening a pull request on GitHub. Took a while for the pull request to go through (and was asked to change the username for clarity) but @arb is now a bot. https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold/pull/1721