Bid Progress, Website Layout Changes, and Presentation!

Moving into the 3rd week, we have partially implemented bid resolution. One can post bids within their budget and they are immediately resolved with other standing bids. However, we do not actually complete any "monetary" transactions, so nobody gains or loses any shares of a prediction. There has been a holdup, but we believe we are very close to completing this. Because we have a list of currently unresolved bids, we can estimate the market price of a prediction based on the lowest Sell price and highest Buy price.

Thanks to lots of CSS styling, our site looks a lot better than before. You should check it out! http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~alexf/test.php

Finally, we are presenting our current progress and goals today to get feedback and other people's insights into our ambitious project.

Short-term Goals for Weeks 3-4:

1. Complete transactions so that users can actually own/shortsell shares of a prediction.
2. Administrator Functions to decide a prediction and award money.
3. Administrator Functions to grant money every day to all users.
4. Tutorial / Description of How to Play the Game.
5. More UI!
6. Security (and HTTPS?)
7. Create the real Facebook app with a sandbox on the side so that we can make changes w/o disrupting users.
8. Advertise our site on Facebook and get people to play it!
9. Think of fun questions to pose to the public.
10. Make some sort of friend invite system with the Facebook API
11. Allow people to submit links/comments about predictions. Alternatively, we can post information regarding them so that it is easier for our players to predict with more certainty.

Layout Changes and Future Goals

We decided that it would be better to split our single big page into a bunch of smaller pages in order to reduce future server load. Don't worry though, since our tabbed layout has stayed the same.

In the future, we will want to just have 4 main pages.

•  A Homepage listing some popular predictions
• The list of predictions and their current probabilities
• User's status (what prediction shares they own and what they are bidding on)
• Help (how to play, how to get more information)

When you access a single prediction, you will be given information about the prediction such as when the market closes, and what prices it is being traded for. You can then post a bid; if the bid can be fulfilled, it will be immediately transacted.

This last step needs to be done. We also want our site to look nice.

We also have issues with HTTPS still, which we are trying to resolve.

Where to put Leaderboards and how we're gathering data will be done later. Perhaps another database table could store the latter.

Since we're close to going live, we will want a playground/test area so that we can continue to make improvements without impacting our live site.

Week One Goals:

We intend to create the database and website; we want to have the basics of the website running by the next meeting on Tuesday.

The tentative schema for the database should be:

User Table

UserID, Authentication, MONEY, Reserve, # correct?

Give money every day. (First bid of the day)

Prediction-User Relation

UID, PredictionID, # that they own (can be +, -, or 0)[, numSell, bidSell, numBuy, bidBuy]

Prediction-User Selling Buying Table

UID, PredictionID, datetime, buyBool, #that you want, price

Prediction Table

PredictionID, Section, Subsection, Question, ClosingDate, DecidingDate, FinalResult

Compute CurrentOdds with a function (as well as max Buy and min Sell)

SELECT max(bidSell) AS minSell FROM pred-usertable WHERE PredictionID = predID

SELECT max(bidBuy) AS maxBuy FROM pred-usertable WHERE PredictionID = predID

 

The website should include

• A home page, which should have a list of all predictions
• A page for each prediction with its individual stats
• A page for bidding on the predictions
• A page for each user's individual stats

If time permits we can expand the webpage, but we plan to have at least this much up by next week.

 

For testing purposes we should fill the database tables with test data until we're ready to open them to the public.