Congratulations to tournament winners katifish, PeterWildeford, and datscilly! Read more about the conclusion of the tournament here.

We’re excited to announce the 2nd Round of the Alt-Protein Tournament, developed in partnership with the Good Food Institute, Multus, and Allfed. How we feed ourselves is changing dramatically as new technology enables possibilities that were once only sci-fi dreams. This tournament challenges the forecasting community to make accurate predictions that span a range of topics, from supply chain management to policy considerations. How will the science, supply chain, and economics of alternative protein change, and how will these changes affect our everyday diet? Forecasts and comments produced for this tournament will be shared directly with our partners and will be used to help set priorities and inform decision making in the alt-protein space.

Though rates of world hunger had remained flat for five years, COVID-19 and other factors resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of malnourished. Current trends suggest the U.N.’s sustainable development goal of zero hunger by 2030 will be “missed by a margin of 660 million people.” In light of this, this round asks the forecasting community to predict developments in cereal, rice, and soya prices, their export regulations, and reported rates of severe food insecurity.

Round 2 questions open on December 13th with new questions released on the 20th and 27th. This tournament features two question types:

• Calibration Questions: these close by April 22, 2023 and resolve by July 31st, 2023 and are used to rank you in the tournament and on the leaderboard below.
• Long-term Questions: in order to probe far into the future and build the Metaculus data set on predictions, we are including a number of far-reaching questions that may not resolve for many years. These questions do not count toward the leaderboard.

Round 2 of the Alt-Protein Tournament makes use of the updated Metaculus Tournament Scoring System. This means that forecasters will not be able to see the community median when a question opens. This hidden period will last for 20% of a question’s duration and participation during this time will completely determine a forecaster’s coverage. (We have set the coverage weight to 100%.) To see the questions you haven’t made forecasts on, use the filter to set the Question Status to Open and My Participation to Not Predicted.

Update December 20th, 2021: The Community Predictions for Round 2’s first ten questions were inadvertently displayed. We introduced the bug when we moved to a more efficient question setup system, and we apologize for the error. In the interest of fairness to all participants, we have determined that the right thing to do is to keep the Community Predictions visible. Questions opening December 20th and 27th will have hidden Community Predictions as described above.

Note that the first round will still be scored using the rules that were in place when the round was launched: Questions’ entire durations will be used to determine participants’ coverage and score.

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far! There’s still plenty of time to start predicting. The scored questions resolve by July 31, 2023, with winners announced that August.