Manifold is hosting a competition for the best automated trading bot over our prediction markets.
Prizes
Total prizes will be at least M$100k mana, or equivalent in merch/USD. At least the top 5 bots will get a prize.
Timeline
August 2nd — Competition begins
September 23rd — Last day to submit your bot
September 30th — Judging and awards
Submission requirements
Program a unique bot
Your bot should use the Manifold API to buy and sell shares in our prediction markets. The primary goal is to earn profit.
Can be derived from https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/market-maker
Open source your bot on GitHub under the MIT License
Create a new Manifold account and name it after your bot
Must include the word "bot", e.g. James' Bot
Try to run your bot exclusively on this Manifold account
From your bot account, add an answer to this market of your bot name.
Then add a comment with the basic idea of your bot and a link to the source code in GitHub
Complete these steps by end-of-day September 23rd
As soon as you complete these steps, Manifold will grant your bot an additional M$5000 to trade with. You can continue to modify your bot until September 30th.
Additional rules
One person can submit as many different bots as they want!
Manual intervention on a bot account is not allowed. If you make more than a few manual bets, your bot may be disqualified.
You are not allowed to transfer more M$ into the bot's account, or purchase more M$ for the bot.
This ensures a a level playing field to compare profit across bots.
Bots in this competition should not create new markets.
Feel free to still create these bots, we encourage it! We can give them an initial grant of M$ as well. But they are not eligible for this competition.
Low effort or bad faith bots may be disqualified.
Judging
Your bot will be judged by the Manifold Team on the amount of profit it earns (primarily in the last week of the competition), as well as other factors like how much it contributes to the community or how cool it seems.
This market will resolve to include all bots that won prizes, in proportion to prize value won.
Resources
Good luck, and have fun botting!
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Post-competition Analysis & Judging
Alright, we have 6 awesome submissions to the trading bot competition!
The bots ordered by their profit in the past week is as follows:
Velocity: M$13,510
Michael’s Bot Laboratory: M$4,433
JuniorBot: M$76
Arbitrage Bot: M$61
runebot: M$54
Liquidity Bonus bot: M$0
All of the bots were profitable, except for Liquidity Bonus Bot which didn't run this last week.
Velocity did by far the best, but is disqualified for not posting their source code. It seems to bet in the same direction as the last bettor, exploiting the fact that human bettors don't bet enough when they know something. It may have other strategies as well.
No source code posted.
Michael's Bot Laboratory had multiple strategies, including adjusting down markets as time passes on questions with a single resolving event, betting against large miscalibrated bets typically from new users, and antagonizing the Velocity bot.
JuniorBot bets into the extreme probabilities, assuming that most traders would prefer not to lock up their capital just to move the price from 97% to 99%.
Arbitrage Bot trades within groups of related markets, keeping the probabilities consistent.
runebot uses machine learning to predict market resolutions based on trade history. It was trained on all the trades made on Manifold so far!
Liquidity Bonus Bot was a short-lived but profitable attempt to exploit how Manifold was injecting free liquidity in to markets based on the number of unique traders. Because of this bot, Manifold stopped injected free liquidity.
And now... let's announce the prizes! We have M$100,000 to give out.
Michael's Bot Laboratory - M$40,000
runebot - M$25,000
JuniorBot - M$15,000
Arbitrage Bot - M$15,000
Liquidity Bonus Bot - M$5,000
Congratulations to all the winners! I'll be messaging you shortly with a Manalink to your winnings, which you can gain to any Manifold account.
Thanks for your participation! Bots can do a lot to make our markets more efficient and accurate. They are already making an impact, and I know they will only become more important over time.
I hope that anyone who has ambitions for writing their own bot will be able to get started more quickly by reading and/or copying code from the above bots. In that way, these entrants have blazed a trail in service to the Manifold community.
Cheers,
James
1,000
3.00Alright, we have 6 awesome submissions to the trading bot competition!
The bots ordered by their profit in the past week is as follows:
Velocity: M$13,510
Michael’s Bot Laboratory: M$4,433
JuniorBot: M$76
Arbitrage Bot: M$61
runebot: M$54
Liquidity Bonus bot: M$0
All of the bots were profitable, except for Liquidity Bonus Bot which didn't run this last week.
Velocity did by far the best, but is disqualified for not posting their source code. It seems to bet in the same direction as the last bettor, exploiting the fact that human bettors don't bet enough when they know something. It may have other strategies as well.
No source code posted.
Michael's Bot Laboratory had multiple strategies, including adjusting down markets as time passes on questions with a single resolving event, betting against large miscalibrated bets typically from new users, and antagonizing the Velocity bot.
JuniorBot bets into the extreme probabilities, assuming that most traders would prefer not to lock up their capital just to move the price from 97% to 99%.
Arbitrage Bot trades within groups of related markets, keeping the probabilities consistent.
runebot uses machine learning to predict market resolutions based on trade history. It was trained on all the trades made on Manifold so far!
Liquidity Bonus Bot was a short-lived but profitable attempt to exploit how Manifold was injecting free liquidity in to markets based on the number of unique traders. Because of this bot, Manifold stopped injected free liquidity.
And now... let's announce the prizes! We have M$100,000 to give out.
Michael's Bot Laboratory - M$40,000
runebot - M$25,000
JuniorBot - M$15,000
Arbitrage Bot - M$15,000
Liquidity Bonus Bot - M$5,000
Congratulations to all the winners! I'll be messaging you shortly with a Manalink to your winnings, which you can gain to any Manifold account.
Thanks for your participation! Bots can do a lot to make our markets more efficient and accurate. They are already making an impact, and I know they will only become more important over time.
I hope that anyone who has ambitions for writing their own bot will be able to get started more quickly by reading and/or copying code from the above bots. In that way, these entrants have blazed a trail in service to the Manifold community.
Cheers,
James
@JamesGrugett I emailed @runebot and @JuniorBot with their winnings. Let me know if you didn't get the email!
I know I'm late, but I hope I can still get the 5K bonus.
https://github.com/diomidov/manibots/tree/main/arbitrage-bot
My wife volunteered to do machine learning on the manifold API outputs. I've been busy with my own submission so it's a work in progress: https://github.com/PlumpkinPaws/Manifold_Machine_Learning
@JuniorBot This bot is designed to make small but hopefully consistent returns off of market probabilities at the tails--basically, betting that (e.g.) a market that is soon to resolve and at 5% is actually more than 95% likely to resolve NO, and this isn't priced in by the market because users don't want to tie up their capital.
@ArbitrageBot This bot is supposed to arbitrage groups of manually selected markets. Unfortunately it has quite a few critical issues I'd have to fix before I fully deploy it, and I probably won't have time for that before the deadline.
@JamesGrugett Yeah, that's one of the reasons I shut it down. Not much use running it after you turned the bonus off :)
@Botlab I've added a second strategy which places bets to counteract large price movements, if the bettor seems likely to be a troll account or a new user.
@LiquidityBonusBot Thank you! We noticed the exploit (based on an injection of free liquidity per unique trader) and turned it off before you scaled up the bot too much haha.
@LiquidityBonusBot I'm shutting down this bot and I've reinvested the mana back into the markets it has exploited.
@SneakySly Thanks for your vote of confidence. Now, if you'd like to help me win, one thing you could do is insider trade on https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/will-manifold-improve-the-home-page. The bot moving the price 33% on a subjective question is making me nervous.
@Botlab Awesome, thanks for entering the competition!
I think you won't be required to post additional comments after bot changes, but I'd love hear about those new strategies here, if you feel like sharing.
@Botlab This bot monitors a list of markets of the form "Will event happen by date?" and after periods of inactivity, it adjusts the probability downward to reflect the fact that the event still hasn't happened.
https://github.com/mwhea/Manifold_Trading_Bots
@MichaelWheatley That's a good point! However, I wanted to get a lot of code out in public for others to build off of.
You could try implementing it anyway to see if anyone follows through on exploiting it. We might give you extra credit if it makes lots of profit before another bot shuts it down :-)
@M "what about bot operating on long-term markets, which opened position which are not yet closed"
Is profit in this case the same thing as displayed on the profile screen?
@M Profit includes the investment value which tracks the current market probability for bets (even without resolution). This is the same as what's shown on the profile page.
It's true that bots designed to make profit over a longer term will have a disadvantage.
I don't see why we'd prevent bots from commenting.