Challenge Owners

A concept inspired by open-source project maintainers, TIG (The Innovation Game) Challenge Owners play a crucial role in the search for algorithmic breakthroughs by crafting and maintaining challenges that drive innovation. In collaboration with TIG Labs, they design challenges and update them as needed to ensure they stay competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms. The most successful Challenge Owners bring a deep understanding of the domain their challenge operates in, as well as a strong professional network in that area.

Challenge Owners are rewarded with a portion of TIG’s token emissions. Their rewards come from both a fixed share and a performance-based component. The fixed share is distributed equally among all active Challenge Owners, while the performance-based portion depends on the number of recent successful algorithmic advances associated with their challenges. In this way, owners are incentivized to create high-quality challenges that lead to meaningful innovation.

Beyond financial incentives, Challenge Owners benefit from aligning their challenges with personal or professional interests. TIG provides them with a way to crowdsource solutions to problems they care about, potentially generating high-impact results beyond the TIG protocol itself.

Challenge Owners have several key responsibilities. They are expected to design robust challenges using their domain expertise, often coding up synthetic instance generators for consistent testing. After launch, they maintain and update their challenges to ensure continued relevance. They also facilitate community discussions on algorithm submissions vying for Advance Rewards and provide quarterly performance reports benchmarking top algorithms. Engaging their professional networks to involve skilled researchers is also an important part of their role.

The presence of Challenge Owners significantly boosts TIG’s ability to scale. Their contributions extend TIG’s reach into new domains, help onboard high-quality challenges more frequently, and connect TIG with new communities of innovators. By supporting and guiding the development of novel algorithms, Challenge Owners play an essential part in accelerating progress and enriching the entire TIG ecosystem.