This is a test of quadratic funding markets as a potentially more robust move selection mechanism for the "Manifold Plays Chess" series.

I'm still wrapping my head around how this thing works. First of all, it's more like a tipping (or, uh, funding) vehicle instead of trading for profits. Anyone can add a new choice to suggest a presumably good move, then contributors can "tip" their preferred choice, with the choice creator getting the donations, but there's also a matching pool which captures "excessive tipping" and sends it to other choices (as well as the market creator, I think?). So, the funds raised get distributed in a more democratic manner than regular free response markets. Seems like an interesting way to fund the creation of conditional binary markets for each suggested move (the funds raised for each move could get added as liquidity, or as an initial YES bet, but how to enforce it of the contributor who got the tips?). Anyway, seems to me there's still many quirks to understand and iron out.

The goal is to prevent "Resign" or any other bad blunders from getting picked, no matter how well funded an attacker might be. They could suggest a blunder and tip it up through an alt (or vice versa), but some of that (if excessive) would subsidize the other, more popular moves. However, I think attackers could still exploit it by using many different accounts to fund it.

When this experiment ends and I resolve (the button says "Pay out matching pool"), I suppose I'll get back some of the $500 subsidy cost and then any tips on the 3 suggestions I made (including the one decoy). So I'll send a manalink worth any excess amount, if any, to whoever ends up running "Manifold Plays Chess 3" (whether they use this mechanism or not). Or if no one gets that project going, maybe I'll post the manalink as a comment here. If an attacker somehow manages to steal the pot, shame on you! Right, I mean you all, honest players who didn't fight for it (just kidding! 😜 ).