OPTIC: Announcing Intercollegiate Forecasting Tournaments in SF, DC, Boston
By Saul Munn, OPTIC, Jingyi_Wang, Tom Shlomi @ 2023-10-13T01:26 (+19)
TLDR: We’re excited to announce that OPTIC is running three intercollegiate forecasting competitions this fall — in the Bay Area (Nov 4), DC (Nov 18) and Boston (Dec 2). Register here!
What does a tournament look like?
Think 1-day hackathon/olympiad/debate tournament, but for forecasting the future — teams predict on topics ranging from geopolitics to celebrity twitter patterns to financial asset prices, and the best forecasters get thousands of dollars in cash prizes and exclusive internships at Metaculus.
Day of, teams give probabilistic predictions for a couple hours on about 30 given questions (with breaks for lunch & speakers). Teams are 3-5 competitors, and we’ll place you on a team if you don’t already have one in mind. A few months after the tournament, all questions resolve and winners are announced/awarded: until then, you can track how your team is doing in real time.
Forecasting, cash prizes & exclusive internships, opportunities to meet other intellectually minded students, more — register here!
Competition Logistics
We’ll be running competitions in the Bay Area (Nov 4), DC (Nov 18), and Boston (Dec 2).
Day of, teams give probabilistic predictions for a couple hours on about 30 given questions (with breaks for lunch & speakers). Teams are 3-5 competitors, and we’ll place you on a team if you don’t already have one in mind. A few months after the tournament, all questions resolve and winners are announced/awarded: until then, you can track how your team is doing in real time.
To get a taste of what a competition looks like, you can:
- Look over our previously used questions
- Watch Seth Blumberg’s speech on the future of forecasting (Seth is a behavioral analyst at Google and the head of Google’s internal prediction market, speaking in a personal capacity)
- If you want a deep look into the nuts and bolts, check out our postmortem of the pilot competition!
Sponsorship & Funding
This semester, OPTIC received funding from Open Philanthropy to run forecasting tournaments. We’re also sponsored by the forecasting platform Metaculus and the quant firm SIG. We’re grateful for their support and excited that participants & sponsors get to interface with with each other through OPTIC.
Previously, we’ve received funding from the Long-Term Future Fund and from the ACX Forecasting Mini-Grants (facilitated through the Manifund Impact Market).
About OPTIC
OPTIC builds intercollegiate forecasting infrastructure. Right now, we’re focused on running in-person, intercollegiate forecasting competitions and incubating university forecasting clubs. See more information on our website, and always feel free to reach out.