More Website News

Leaderboards have been altered a bit; they now track percentages and also show the user's rank even if they're not in the top 10. 

The tutorial page has been changed a bit, although it could still be improved.

We added some predictions but we need more.  This is one of the most important things right now.

The ad has been completed and posted.  We don't have anywhere near the number of users we'd need to get proper data, though.  Maybe we should try advertising to Caltech?

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.

Viewing Predictions and Making Bids!

We now have an admittedly clunky interface to look at the current predictions and make bids on them via PHP/Postgres. We will eventually have more questions than the ones posted now. Take a look at http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~alexf/test.php.