The Innovation Game (TIG)

https://t.co/UzGaY94NEM

Andrej,

I’m John Fletcher. I have a PhD in mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge, and since 2016 I have been working full-time on the problem of how to coordinate untrusted distributed compute for algorithmic innovation.

I listened to your No Priors conversation and recognised the architecture you were describing: commits that build on each other, computational asymmetry (hard to find, cheap to verify), an untrusted pool of workers collaborating through a blockchain-like structure.

The result is The Innovation Game (TIG), which has been in continuous operation since mid-2024. The correspondence is so close that I thought it worth writing.

The short version: roughly 7,000 Benchmarkers test algorithms submitted by Innovators by solving instances of asymmetric computational challenges (SAT, Vehicle Routing, Quadratic Knapsack, Vector Search, among others).

This testing is "proof of work" in the technical sense of Dwork and Naor (1992). Innovators earn rewards proportional to adoption by the Be