Buying, Selling, and the New Server

With php-back end and game logic, we have implemented the ability to buy and sell shares of predictions, along with the associated transferal of money.  You can also remove bids.  May need to do some debugging.  Very close to being able to decide predictions; all that's missing is the transfer of money.

Were given a new server thanks to George Lee and Steven Low; spent some time setting up http, ssh, php, and postgres.  Still trying to work out how to link it to the sites and stuff.  Will eventually be at 4sight.wil.caltech.edu .  Trying to figure out how to setup a database with the same name as our old one and no password required.

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.