# Coordinating Intelligence : Open Algorithm Development for Science, AI, and Beyond | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 09:21
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-oyiCNkN8468
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyiCNkN8468

## Description

The Innovation Game (TIG) is a market-based framework accelerating development of computational methods crucial to science, engineering, and AI. It creates a "synthetic market" where "Innovators" contribute methods and are rewarded based on adoption by "Benchmarkers," who are rewarded for solving random instances of computational challenges. This enables price discovery for commercial and pre-commercial research, attracting private investment. TIG's hybrid licensing model ensures open collaborat

Speaker(s): Dr John Fletcher, PhD, Kilian Hikaru Scheutwinkel
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Coordination
Keywords: Coordination, DeSci, Economics, proof, optimised, work

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## Transcript

[Music] [Music] hello hello um my name is Killian thank you for the kind introduction and I'm going to talk about the Innovation game um unfortunately the founder John Fletcher couldn't make it due to scheduling issues so I had to jump in last minute um we are a Project based out of Cambridge University um myself I'm a PhD candidate in astrophysics and Dr John Fletcher is a applied mathematician also from Cambridge so what is the Innovation game well our theme or our mission is to incentivize algorithmic Innovation well what does it exactly mean you may ask um if you look at the scientific literature uh you see that um most problems um such as the traveling salesman problem that you might know right um finding the shortest distance between let's say 20 cities this kind of problem is a hard problem to solve and you can only solve it through like various types of algorithms what you see in this graph is on the x-axis um the year on the y-axis you see like some kind of performance metrics when you run these algorithms so for instance uh in the first let's say 1940s to 1970s for let's say the traveling salesman problem people have been just brute forcing Solutions which is not very efficient right so you have for instance uh uh a performance of one a constant right but then people started to innovate on the algorithm side um and what they achieved is like a magnitudes of order of performance boost just by having an algorith for instance the red curve you see uh it is two to the power 40 more efficient to innovate on the algorithm sign for a given problem versus uh another algorithm like the BL the blue ones and then the green ones as well why do we care well you can achieve a lot of breakthroughs just by not just by optimizing Hardware but we by um innovating in the algorithm space right um and why I'm talking about that in in the blockchain conference well our protocol is there to incentivize this kind of algorithmic breakthrough and how do we do that we actually using blockchain technology um you may know that uh blockchain is more about like transactions Etc and how do we achieve that kind of like algorithmic Breakthrough and how do we incentivize that right uh we are actually using the proof of work mechanism such as um you might know from Bitcoin and basically having uh many algorithms together um and then Benchmark those and find the best ones for a given problem right so let's say you have for the traveling salesman problem you have four uh different kinds of algorithm people have been implementing and then you use the benchmarking process which is the proof of work mechanism where you mine for the best algorithm right and once you found the best algorithm you basically reward uh the people that have been providing the IP to our platform but also the minor who has been uh providing Computer Resources so on the right side you basically see how our system works um just as a side note of course we also need to verify that the algorithms uh that were submitted to platform are also correct so that means uh is the solution correct but also is the method correct right um and how do we capture value for the innovator well we can basically um uh run uh two licenses for the proprietary or for the open source algorithm one the open license uh open data license that means any algorithm that is found through our platform uh can be used for free if you also publish the data why is that relevant well imagine you have a scientific paper in biology would you trust the paper if you're not providing the data as well no right it's very unscientific um so we are following the EOS of Open Source or Academia through this license and the other license is okay I don't want to publish my data but I can use uh pay a small fee like a license to access the algorithm and what we are basically doing is we are combating through the Innovation game uh the centralization risk uh through AI driven algorithms so what does it mean nowadays you have large language models and it is possible to Now look for um solutions by using large language models which is not very good because that means uh suddenly your um hard um Innovation is directly dependent on the amount of compute you provide which is um bad because most of the large capital for these Computing uh platforms are at meta Google Etc but we are based at The Innovation game we are the only protocol as of now that can incentivize and combat this type of um AI driven algorithm development by um incentivizing and rewarding the people that provide our IP to our platform thank you thank you Killian do have any questions from the audience for Killian one over there you want to try I don't think so I'm [Laughter] sorry okay time to work outan thanks for that uh so on that chart of algorithm development over time I noticed there were quite large step functions do you expect that algorith Al algorithmic development is continuous enough for the rewards to actually incentivize the actors uh yeah so we expect that most of the people that use our platform are probably not innovating uh they are more like benchmarkers or like they look at existing algorithms and then optimize the code a little bit so we expect that it's very difficult to innovate but we want to incentivize this behavior um and the um challenges that we include in our or let's say mathematical computationally challenging problems that we include our platform uh various sorts of for Relevant for blockchain would be for instance ZK proving mechanism right it is uh hard to compute a proof generally but it's easy to verify right so this is very um very uh relevant for let's say the blockchain industry um if people are innovating on our platform other areas could include AI that we also work on um and yeah other uh theoretical computer comput computer science um prob as well thank you we have time for one more question it's over there I have a funny one so you maybe people don't here know but there was a mess up and everyone got an email about the Innovation game all the speakers so did it uh do anything for awareness of what of the work that you doing or did it have no effect because I'm here because I got that email too of the Innovation game could you repeat the question I couldn't so from the Defcon committee there was a an email that was sent out to everyone who uh ever applied for a speaker slot and that included uh it was a it was an incorrect email but it it included The Innovation game so I was just wondering did it do anything for the awareness of what you're working on or did it have no effect cuz I thought it would sorry I couldn't catch your question could you please like close speak closer to the mic or you can come after the talk I'm sorry I couldn't understand it we can come we can talk afterwards yeah it's okay I guess we'll have private conversation around that question after the session uh anyone else we still have a little bit of the opening for a question one over here I'll just ask a very general question um what would you like us to do with this information sorry what do you want us to do with this information now like where do you want us to go research in or so you can reach out to us if you have any hard problem let's say in Defi and you want to formulate let's say a computational problem you can reach out to us or if you're Hardware or like benchmarker you can use our system to to mine and Benchmark the these different algorithms so there are two approaches either you want to provide a challenge for us um or you want to provide compute or maybe you're a developer you want to provide actually an algorithm so there these tracks amazing that's time for us thank you again kilan uh another round of applause for Killian