July 31 is right around the corner

Hi Fellow AlphaNovans,

We are 20 days to the end of submissions to May 2026 Competition. As you will have surely noticed from the structure of the contest, we will continue to monitor (and you'll see the monitoring on the leaderboard) till October 31, 2026. Cash rewards will be distributed after that date. The reason we have to do this is, in the event (and this has happened before) that a contestant spent time de-obfuscating the data and essentially fitting a model to the test set, we can notice it quite easily. what happens in that case is the performance does an immediate hockey stick pattern- smoothly up then fairly smoothly down on live data.

Whatever is not spent on the potential 50K prize pot will be moved into the biweekly aggregate prize pot, which we expect will in aggregate be more than 50K, but we shall see. so in the biweekly, the total aggregate cash prizes will be similar to this contest but will be short term fast cash payouts at a smaller total prize per every 2 week period.

Best

Marc