TIG Challenge Developer Grant: Milestones Overview

This document outlines the high-level requirements and expectations for successfully achieving the technical milestones of The Innovation Game (TIG) Challenge Developer Grants Program.

Milestone 1: 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).

Milestone 2: 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.

Milestone 3: Delivery of Implementation

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

1. Create a new branch from blank_slate.
2. Implement your challenge in the tig-challenge crate. Expected files:
   • Rust implementation: <challenge>.rs
   • Challenge description: <challenge>.md
   • (optional) CUDA implementation: <challenge>.cu
3. Implement a simple working algorithm in the tig-algorithm crate.
4. Update tig-binary, tig-runtime, and tig-verifier to import your challenge.
5. Coordinate with the Foundation to deploy your challenge to testnet.
6. Where necessary, iterate on the implementation to address issues.

Important:

• TIG requires runtime_signature and fuel tracking.
  • This is natively supported by tig-binary and tig-runtime if your code is written in Rust and/or CUDA.
  • Use of other languages (e.g., Python, C++) must be discussed in advance and may require additional integration work.
• We strongly recommend using Rust and/or CUDA, unless a specific framework is essential (e.g., quantum challenges using PennyLane).

Milestone 4: 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