Cycle 1 of Seaon 1 closes at midnight UTC tonight! Automatically, Cycle 2 will start after midnight

Hi fellow AlphaNovans

Cycle 1 has been open since 15 August. Submissions close tonight at 00:00 UTC on 1 September, and Cycle 2 opens the moment it does — no gap, nothing to sign up for again.

If you have something nearly ready, tonight is the deadline. After midnight it counts toward Cycle 2, not Cycle 1.

What happens at the boundary:

• Your submission count resets to 20 for Cycle 2.
• Cycle 1 goes into its live scoring window — one month, ending around 1 October. That's when Cycle 1 settles and prizes are paid.
• Cycle 2 accepts submissions until 15 September, running alongside Cycle 1's live scoring. Two windows overlapping at any time is by design.

The part worth planning around: the legacy pot:

When Cycle 1 closes, every submission that passed the entry checks moves into the season's legacy pot — including the ones that scored badly. Pot signals are no longer prize-eligible, but they keep occupying their neighbourhood in signal space for the rest of the season.

The practical consequence: resubmitting a Cycle 1 entry blocks itself. It correlates ~1.0 with its own copy in the pot, so it can't enter the quality set. Small perturbations do barely better. Cycle 2 rewards signals that are new relative to everything already submitted this season — including your own earlier work.

So if your plan for Cycle 2 was "tune the lookback and resubmit", it's worth rethinking now rather than on 14 September.

One thing in your favour

Each cycle carries a $2,500 budget, and whatever isn't paid out rolls into the next cycle's pot. Pots are set by the number of quality signals admitted, and prizes go to the top 3 in that set — 60/25/15.

Good luck to everyone with something in flight tonight.

Best

NONIUS