A small game

Beat the robots

Twelve boxes go past. Each one has a price on the tag and some stars on the lid. You can open a box, or let it go. Four robots play the same twelve boxes beside you, and each of them has one rule it never breaks. Everybody's coins go down. Whoever has the most left at the end has the most left — and how they manage it is the whole point of this website.

Nothing in this game is real. No price on this page ever happened, no trade here is a trade, and nobody's money is in any box.

What is real is where the numbers come from. Each box's prize is drawn from the shape of this system's own seventy-five closed currency trades — 36% winners, +0.68R average win, −1.22R average loss, capped at the real best and worst (+0.96 / −1.73R). The stars are the live Virtus-Fin conviction score, and they are drawn independently of what is in the box, because that is what the measurement found: +0.019 on crypto and −0.052 on equities across 995 real trades. The price is the round trip, drawn across the range the cost table measures against a 2.5R target, and it is the only thing on this page connected to what a box pays. A coin here is one twentieth of one R — one unit of what this system was willing to risk on a trade. It is not a pound or a dollar.

The deal is seeded, so ?deal=1234 is a game anyone can replay and check — including the robots. You will not be dealt a worse box for doing well, and that is something you can verify rather than take on trust. The full arithmetic is at the bottom of the page.

box — of — deal —

Greedy opens every box · Sparkle opens the shiny ones · Guessy opens the same number as Sparkle, by guessing · Careful opens the cheap ones

How shiny Price to open —coins

For grown-ups

Two of those robots exist only to be somebody else's control.

Greedy and Sparkle are the two rules anyone would think of. Careful and Guessy are there to find out whether either of them is doing anything — and that pairing is the method this whole system is built on rather than a device invented for a game.

Guessy is why Sparkle cannot be trusted

Sparkle finishes with more coins than Careful in about 86 games out of 100 — and not by picking better. Sparkle opens three boxes where Careful opens eight, and in a game where the average box loses money, the way to lose less is to play less. Guessy opens exactly as many boxes as Sparkle and picks them by guessing. Across thirty thousand games Sparkle finishes ahead of Guessy 51 times in 100. That is a coin, and it is the same matched null every strategy on this site has been tested against.

Careful cannot see the future either

She has no opinion about what is in a box and she is never told. She reads the price tag and refuses anything over a tenth of what the box could pay. That is subtraction, not prediction — which is exactly why it is the only part of the real conviction score allowed to refuse a live trade. Measured over four years of real bid/ask, the configuration this retired was paying a quarter of its target to the spread and losing 0.19R a trade across twelve thousand of them.

The stars are a real number, not a decoration

Every box's stars come from the live Virtus-Fin score: five factors, weighted, minus what the round trip costs. It is computed on every instrument on every cycle of the real engines and recorded against every entry. It is real. What was refuted is its predictive power — ranking a venue's own trades by it gave +0.019 on crypto and −0.052 on equities across 995 trades — so it ships switched off on two venues out of three. The full formula is here.

And this game is kinder than the book it is drawn from

In the game Careful usually finishes ahead. In the real currency book the cost gate makes the losses smaller, not positive: cutting the cost ratio from 25% to 1.9% takes the bleed from −0.186R to −0.040R and stops there. Nothing in that table is positive. The book's measured expectancy over its last sixty closed trades is −0.55R with a t of −4.41, the governor has cut it to half risk, and the strategy has not opened a position since 11 August. Doing nothing at all beat every robot in this game, too.

The formula, in full
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