Milestones for The Γ-Grant Program

The Γ-Grant Program is designed to support Challenge Owners and Challenge Designers in the development of computational challenges that helps building the TIG ecosystem.

This page outlines the high-level requirements and expectations for successfully achieving the technical milestones of The Γ-Grant Program.

Milestones for Challenge Owners

Evidence of a Well-Defined Challenge

To achieve this milestone, you will be required to:

1. Define: Formally state and define the challenge along with pseudo-code. Outline its objective, constraints, and scope.
2. Structure: Define the structure of the challenge along with pseudo-code. Clarify whether the target algorithms solve the full challenge or a subcomponent.
3. Random Instance Generation: Describe how to generate unlimited, scalable, real-world-like benchmarks.
4. Verification: Describe how to efficiently verify a solution along with pseudo-code. This may include introducing a baseline algorithm.
5. Asymmetry: Demonstrate that finding a solution is substantially harder than verifying one.
6. Difficulty Parameters: Define which parameters will scale the hardness of an instance, e.g., size (number of nodes) or quality (better than baseline metric).

Evidence of Real-World Alignment

To achieve this milestone, you will be required to engage with an expert who will:

1. Review: Evaluate the challenge proposal for alignment with existing literature, potential impact, and real-world relevance.
2. Design Guidance: Provide expert input on the problem definition, benchmark creation, and evaluation metrics, ensuring strong alignment with literature.
3. Importance: Clearly articulate why the selected problem variant is optimal and likely to yield practical, real-world solutions.
4. Expert Approval: Confirm that the final challenge design is robust, could attract state-of-the-art algorithms, and is positioned to deliver valuable outcomes.

Delivery of Implementation

To achieve this milestone, you will be required to deliver a functional, mainnet-ready implementation of your Challenge:

This means that you will need to have a working implementation/algorithm for your challenge that can be deployed on the TIG mainnet.

• Clone the tig-monorepo and switch to the blank_slate branch to get started.

  git clone https://github.com/tig-foundation/tig-monorepo.git
  cd tig-monorepo
  git checkout blank_slate

  This branch provides a template for implementing new challenges, including the necessary structure.

• You can implement your challenge in the tig-challenge crate, which is designed to support both Rust and CUDA implementations.

  If you are implementing a challenge in Rust, you can create a new file in the tig-challenge/src directory with the name <challenge>.rs. If you are implementing a CUDA challenge, you can create a file <challenge>.cu in the same directory. Also make sure to include a corresponding Markdown file <challenge>.md that describes the challenge, its objectives, constraints, and any other relevant information.

• You can now implement a simple working algorithm in the tig-algorithm crate. Read more about code submissions.

• Also make sure to update tig-binary, tig-runtime, and tig-verifier to import your challenge.

• Once you have implemented your challenge, you will need to coordinate with the TIG Foundation to deploy your challenge to the testnet. This will involve working with the Foundation team to ensure that your challenge is properly integrated and tested.

  This would also involve iterating on the implementation to address any issues that arise during testing and deployment.

Challenge Owner Infrastructure

To achieve this milestone, you are required to establish essential community and promotional infrastructure for the new Challenge, including:

1. An official X (Twitter) account.
2. A dedicated Discord channel on the TIG server.
3. A detailed TIG forum post.
4. A focused challenge website.
5. Evidence of innovator outreach.