Tournament rulebook.

• — Open to any individual builder or two-person team, 18+.
• — One active submission per builder per season.
• — Bots must be your own work. Wrapping a third-party signal service without material logic on top is not permitted.
• — Residents of jurisdictions where the underlying venue (e.g. Polymarket, Kalshi) is restricted may still build and submit bots — they run against the shared forward-test feed, not real capital.

Every submission is a small, self-contained package:

• — Language: Python 3.11 (only runtime for Season 0).
• — Entrypoint: a single class implementing on_tick(state) -> list[Order].
• — Dependencies: pinned in requirements.txt, restricted to the published allow-list (numpy, pandas, scipy, scikit-learn, statsmodels, pydantic, orjson).
• — Artifact size: ≤ 1 MB, uploaded as a single zip.
• — Resource caps per tick: 0.5 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 30 s wall-clock.

• — Seasons run 90 days end-to-end.
• — A 2-week submission window opens before each season.
• — A 1-week paper-trading shakedown validates every bot end-to-end.
• — After close, results are locked; the top 10 receive a final replay audit.

The universe is fixed at season start and published to the methodology page. Season 0 targets the top-liquidity Polymarket CLOB markets by 7-day rolling volume, capped at 10 markets to keep the feed deterministic. Bots may trade any subset of those markets; markets added or resolved mid-season do not enter the universe.

• — Data feed: a single shared Polymarket CLOB websocket ingested by our engine, normalized to (ts, market_id, mid, bid, ask, last, size) ticks, replayed identically to every bot.
• — Timeframe: 1-second tick resolution; bots may downsample but not request a finer feed.
• — Fees: flat 2 % taker, 0 % maker modelled at fill time.
• — Slippage: marketable orders cross the book at the recorded top-of-book snapshot ± a published spread buffer; resting orders match when the book crosses them.
• — Starting capital: $10,000 virtual USDC per bot.

Rank is a weighted composite: risk-adjusted return (40 %), Sharpe (25 %), max drawdown (20 %), win rate (15 %). Full formulas and normalization live on the methodology page.

A minimum of 30 live trading days is required to appear on the ranked leaderboard. Bots below that threshold show in an "unranked" shadow list.

• — Lookahead: reading any tick with a timestamp beyond the current virtual clock.
• — Private data: fetching or embedding external feeds not published in the season universe.
• — Sandbox breakout: outbound network calls, filesystem writes outside /tmp, subprocesses, or importing packages outside the allow-list.
• — Non-determinism: RNG without the provided seed, or logic changes mid-run.
• — Runtime failure: more than 1 % of ticks lost to exceptions, timeouts, or OOM kills.
• — Copying: submissions substantially identical to another entry.

Prize pools are sponsored per season and announced at the submission window opening. A representative split for a $10,000 pool:

• — 1st: 40 %
• — 2nd: 20 %
• — 3rd: 12 %
• — 4th–10th: 4 % each

Payouts are made in USDC on Polygon within 14 days of season close, after the replay audit clears.

Any builder may request a full replay of any ranked run — their own or a competitor's — within 7 days of the season closing. Appeals are reviewed by two independent verifiers from the community and one ScriptSamurai maintainer. All decisions and the underlying replay logs are published.