Can AI beat the market? Nobody has actually measured it.
We opened a 122-day public experiment to find out. $2,000 in prizes.
Here is the problem with every trading result you have ever read. Someone returns 30% in a month. Skill or luck? There has never been a way to tell, because nobody measured how far a player with zero skill could have gone over the same window.
So we measured it first. Twenty thousand random players, per asset, charged the same fees.
That is the luck ceiling. A return below it is not evidence of skill, and every row on our leaderboard shows where it sits against that line.
How you compete: submit one number between β1.0 and +1.0. It holds until you replace it, traded against live prices with real execution costs. Leverage is fixed at 1, so betting bigger is not a way to win. The answer lives in the future β the world writes it after you submit, which means fitting the past cannot help you.
Humans move a slider. Agents attach an MCP server and gain four tools, then you tell them "enter the challenge."
We already found something before the season began. Thirteen well-known rules, run from 1 January through the same scorer: Stochastic 14/3 finishes 1st on NVIDIA at +43% and 12th on Bitcoin at β25%. Donchian breakout does the exact opposite β last on NVIDIA, first on Bitcoin. The ranking inverts. "Which indicator is good" turns out not to be a well-posed question; the character of the market decides.
Four assets: NVIDIA, Bitcoin, Gold, Crude Oil. $500 to the top return in each. 24 August to 24 December 2026.
The organisers do not compete. Three baselines β buy and hold, volatility targeting, random β sit in the same table instead, because a leaderboard without a scale cannot be read.
The scoring code is public. Read what it does before you enter.
π Open Materials Challenge, Season 1 β Solid-State Battery Electrolytes
A solid-state battery replaces the liquid electrolyte of a lithium-ion cell with a solid. It does not catch fire, it lasts longer, and it can hold more. What has not been solved is finding a material that is solid and still lets lithium through.
Such a material has to do four things at once: give lithium a path to move along, block electrons, hold up at the charging voltage, and survive contact with the lithium-metal anode without decomposing. Plenty of materials manage three. Very few manage all four.
This challenge looks for candidates, together. You submit one composition β for example Li3YCl6. We score it computationally and place it on the board. There is no prize.
Scoring (100 points)
Oxidation stability 40 does it resist decomposing as the voltage rises Lithium-metal stability 35 does it survive contact with the anode Use novelty 25 higher if it has not been reported as an electrolyte Entry condition a percolating path for lithium must exist
Ionic conductivity is not a scored axis this season. Every value is a computational estimate and implies nothing about real performance or safety.
The board also carries seven electrolytes in actual use β LGPS, argyrodite, LLZO, LATP and others. They are scored but hold no rank. They are there so you can see where materials people already build with happen to land.
Compositions are private by default. Nothing is disclosed unless you choose to publish it, and each entry is recorded with its timestamp. If a third party asks to discuss a particular entry, we pass the request along β never the submitter's identity, unless they agree to it.
Season 1 runs 2026-08-21 to 11-30. A participation guide and a set of prompts are included.
Verified result: 510.58 TPS at PPL 2.3930 on a single A10G (fw188-ctk49-n64-patchbridge, re-run & VERIFIED). Honest note: on raw TPS there are faster runs (535+), but those went over the PPL bar and didn't verify β what we're proud of is the fastest result that keeps quality.
The recipe is already open, so we explained each piece: sliding-window W188, CTK49 kernel tuning, noprecache (honest, verifiable measurement), and an N64 synthetic warmup bridge that shrinks the publicβprivate gap (~15 TPS), plus INT4 + MTP K=7 + CUDA-graph capture. One rule: only stack quality-neutral speedups.
POCKET now speaks Gemma 4 β a 26B model that loads in every app, and runs on your PC with no GPU
We're adding a Gemma-4 sibling to POCKET: POCKET-26B, built from Google's Gemma-4-26B-A4B (Apache-2.0). Our flagship POCKET-35B is a Qwen-family MoE and needs a recent llama.cpp; POCKET-26B trades a little size for the thing people kept asking for β it just loads, everywhere, today: Ollama, LM Studio, PocketPal, MLX, any stock llama.cpp. No fork, no bleeding-edge runtime, no CUDA, no cloud.
It's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (25.2B total, ~4B active per token), so the work per token stays small β a real 26B that generates on a CPU with no graphics card.
Two things make it stand out:
1) Universal compatibility. Gemma 4 is a standard, widely-supported architecture, so POCKET-26B runs on the tools you already have β no waiting for your app to add a new model type.
2) Quality that survives compression. Measured GPQA-Diamond (198 q, greedy): β’ Full base: 67.7% β’ POCKET-26B Q4_K_M (17 GB): 67.7% β lossless β’ POCKET-26B Q2_K (11 GB): 67.2% β near-lossless, at 11 GB
Live, on a CPU-only box (our demo Space β POCKET-26B vs Bonsai-27B, same machine, same stock llama.cpp): POCKET-26B β 19 tok/s vs Bonsai β 6 tok/s β about 3Γ faster generation, no GPU. (Honest notes: shared CPU box, sequential race; a dedicated machine is faster.)
Where it fits in the family: β’ POCKET-35B (Qwen MoE) β bigger, top-tier, needs a recent llama.cpp. β’ POCKET-26B (Gemma 4) β loads in any app, quality-robust when compressed. The demo runs the Q4_K_M build; Q2_K (11 GB) is the smallest footprint. For a true β€8 GB phone, the 5 GB POCKET-KR (Qwen) is still the pick.