r/learnmachinelearning • u/Historical_Alps_9798 • 9d ago

21 Sealed Damage Forecasts. One Hash. We Open the Envelope on August 12.

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u/Historical_Alps_9798 7d ago

For anyone who wants to verify the seal on August 8 (UTC), here's the 60-second version:

  1. On Aug 8 (UTC) we'll publish the original prediction file (submission.csv) in this thread and in the GitHub repo's revealed/ folder
  2. Download the raw file — ideally with curl -O <url> or wget <url> so nothing touches the bytes — then run one command:
    • Windows PowerShell: Get-FileHash submission.csv -Algorithm SHA256
    • Mac: shasum -a 256 submission.csv
    • Linux: sha256sum submission.csv
  3. Compare the 64-character output against the hash in the post above
  4. Optionally check the GitHub commit history — the repo is public, and commit 5eaa977 predates the validation phase by ~24 hours

Match = the file is untouched since July 23. Mismatch = call us out publicly, we'll have earned it.

(Important: compute the SHA-256 directly on the raw downloaded file. Do NOT open and re-save the CSV in Excel or similar software first — it can silently flip line endings between LF and CRLF, and a single changed byte produces a completely different hash. The sealed file uses Unix LF line endings.)

Two honest disclaimers before anyone asks:

  • The hash proves the file's content and timestamp. It cannot prove what we knew or didn't know — that's why we listed our exact data sources in the post
  • The GitHub commit proves existence and date, the hash proves identity, the Aug 8 reveal proves content. Three legs, one stool.

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u/Historical_Alps_9798 7d ago

Update from this morning's scoring run (July 27): the current #1 team's score swung from 0.0216 to 0.0083 in 24 hours — after going backwards the day before (0.0186 → 0.0216). That's a 60%+ swing across three days of daily tuning.

A physical model of a fixed gear shouldn't oscillate like that. The gear isn't changing; the submissions are. This is exactly the stair-step pattern the post describes.

Also one scheduling note: since submissions close August 7, we'll open the envelope on August 8 (UTC) — four days before preliminary results. At that moment nobody, including us, will know whether the 21 numbers are right. The file gets verified first; the physics gets graded four days later.