# Competition Format Specification v0.1 **Companion to:** Human Capability Taxonomy v0.1 (what is measured) **This document:** how it is played, watched, and won. **Status:** Draft. Event designs are candidates, not fixtures. --- ## 0. The four rules that make it a sport Everything else is negotiable. These four are constitutive — break any one and the property becomes a game show with a scoring gimmick. 1. **Elimination is failure against a published standard, never placing last in a heat.** You go out because you fell below the floor in some domain. Not because someone beat you. 2. **The floor and the norms are published before the season opens.** Never changed mid-season, never adjusted after results are known. 3. **Competitors know which capabilities can be tested. They never know how.** The event catalogue is public; the specific instantiation is not. You train yourself, not the exam. 4. **No single event can end a season.** Every domain gets at least three independent attempts across a season window. A minimum is a noisy statistic and one bad day must not be decisive. --- ## 1. Season shape Not a series. A calendar, like a league. | Window | Tier | Format | Who | |---|---|---|---| | Weeks 1–2 | **Season Open** | Free remote test, global, synchronised | Anyone | | Weeks 3–20 | **Open Logging** | Certified venues, log attempts any time | Anyone | | Weeks 21–28 | **City Meets** | Verified, in person | Floor ≥ 50th | | Weeks 29–36 | **Nationals** | Individual + team-selection events | Floor ≥ 70th | | Weeks 40–44 | **Continental** | Individual + Nations bracket | Floor ≥ 80th | | Week 50 | **World Final** | One continuous mission | ~24 individuals | **Season Open** is the household mechanic. One week, every year, everywhere: the same free 20-minute remote test. Cognitive, decision, calibration, creativity and part of Integrity run on a phone at near-zero marginal cost. It generates the norms database, it costs almost nothing, and it is the thing your friend sends you a screenshot of. --- ## 2. Tier by tier ### T1 · Season Open — remote, free Five domains testable remotely. Output: a provisional Floor and Composite, plus an explicit note of which domains are unmeasured. No advancement, no elimination. Purpose is norms, reach, and the top of the funnel. ### T2 · Open Logging — certified venues The physical and social domains require a certified venue and a certified assessor. Log attempts across the window; best of N counts. This is where the coaching economy lives — you can see exactly which domain is your floor, and buy help for it. ### T3 · City Meets — verification, floor ≥ 50th Same-day verified attempts. **Phase: Baseline.** Every domain measured cleanly, in isolation, under standard conditions. No interference, no fatigue stacking. This is the measurement tier and deliberately the least dramatic. ### T4 · Nationals — floor ≥ 70th Two things happen at once. **Individual track — Phase: Specialists.** Each event isolates one capability. Named events, repeated every season, trainable, comparable across years: | Event | Isolates | |---|---| | The Engine | Cardiorespiratory endurance, speed | | The Force | Maximal strength, explosive power | | The Labyrinth | Spatial reasoning, navigation | | The Unknown Rule | Fluid reasoning, rule induction | | The Memory Room | Working memory under interference | | The Market | Resource allocation, risk calibration | | The Exchange | Negotiation, theory of mind | | The Reset | Strategy switching after a rule change | | The Workshop | Divergent thinking, invention | | The Long Game | Cognitive endurance | | Precision | Fine motor, attention | **Team track.** Rotating-team events run in parallel, estimating each competitor's marginal effect on team output across many independent team configurations. This — not the top six composites — selects the national squad. A competitor with a Floor of 71 who reliably raises team output belongs ahead of an 84 who doesn't. Different construct, different squad, better television. ### T5 · Continental — floor ≥ 80th **Phase: Interference.** Everything gets harder because everything happens at once. Cognitive tasks under physical fatigue. Navigation while carrying resources. Negotiation with incomplete information. Puzzles where teammates hold separate pieces. Scoring here is a **ratio, not a level**: stressed score ÷ baseline score from T3. A competitor who goes 92 → 84 outranks one who goes 97 → 63. State this loudly and often. It is the philosophical centre of the format. **Phase: Chaos** runs alongside. Unknown resources, random starting conditions, asymmetric information, probabilistic payoffs — but every competitor faces *statistically equivalent* uncertainty. You are not testing who got lucky. You are testing who plays variance well. The **Nations bracket** runs here too, as a parallel competition with its own title. ### T6 · World Final — ~24 individuals, no further elimination See §3. --- ## 3. The World Final: one continuous mission Not ten separate events. **One 36-hour staged mission** with nine embedded gates, every one of which scores. Nobody is eliminated. Everybody finishes. | Segment | Embedded gates | Note | |---|---|---| | **1 · The Launch** | Endurance, navigation, seeding | Staggered start bought by season ranking | | **2 · The Cache** | Resource allocation under uncertainty | Choose what to carry, not knowing what's needed | | **3 · The Ledger** | Negotiation, theory of mind | Forced trade with rivals; asymmetric information | | **4 · The Break** | Adaptation | The rules change. Publicly. Mid-mission | | **5 · The Build** | Creativity, invention, dexterity | Build with only what you chose to carry | | **6 · The Watch** | Vigilance, cognitive endurance | Overnight. Signal in noise. The quiet hours | | **7 · The Call** | Leadership, crisis decision-making | Randomised command over randomised teams | | **8 · The Reckoning** | Integrity | Unobserved, unenforceable, costly to do right | | **9 · The Close** | Precision under maximum fatigue | Fine motor at hour 34, with the result live | **Carry-over is advantage, not score.** Season ranking buys a head start, better starting resources, and event-order choice — and all of it decays by design. Resources deplete, gaps compress. Seeding decides the first third; execution decides the last. Grid position in F1, not a points lead in a league. **Two titles, published separately and honestly:** - **Season Ranking** — many trials, stable, reliable. This is the scientific instrument. - **World Champion** — whoever wins the mission. One day, high variance, high drama. Marathon world record versus Olympic champion. Nobody finds that contradictory, and it lets the spectacle be genuinely uncertain without the research artifact pretending a single trial is a precise measurement. --- ## 4. The Nations title Runs in parallel, its own bracket, its own trophy. Every country fields a squad regardless of individual depth, so every market has a stake and a flag to follow — without a single seat in the individual ladder being allocated by passport. Squads are selected on marginal team contribution (T4 team track), not individual composite. Events are cooperative and adversarial-cooperative: shared-information puzzles, resource pooling, coordinated physical tasks, negotiation between national squads. This is where the commercial layer lives. The individual title stays uncontaminated. --- ## 5. What the audience controls **Never elimination. Never scoring.** - **Event selection.** From a pre-certified set of psychometrically equivalent variants, the audience votes on which runs. Real agency, genuine stakes, measurement untouched. - **The People's Champion.** A separate title with its own prize, decided purely by vote. Let popularity be rewarded openly rather than let it leak into the ladder. - **Peer votes are different and they *are* data.** "Who do you most want on your next team?" aggregated across many rotating teams is a validated sociometric measure. Rotation is what stops it becoming an alliance game. --- ## 6. Broadcast architecture The show is the world championship of an underlying participation sport — not the product. | Tier | Content shape | Rights | |---|---|---| | Season Open | User-generated, shareable score cards | Free, viral | | City Meets | Local, low-cost, community | Free / local sponsor | | Nationals | Regional broadcast, national narratives | National rights | | Continental | Premium, Nations bracket drama | Continental rights | | World Final | 36-hour tentpole, live + edited | Global rights | Year-round narrative comes free: everyone's Floor is public and moving. "She raised her weakest domain from 61 to 79 in nine months" is a story that runs all season without a production crew. --- ## 7. Known format risks 1. **The final is one trial.** Mitigated by publishing the season ranking as a separate, co-equal title — not by pretending the mission is precise. 2. **Floor is a minimum, so it is noisy.** Mitigated by best-of-N within the season window. This is expensive in certified venue time and is the main operational cost driver. 3. **Integrity events are one-shot and unrepeatable.** Likely has to function as a gate you must not fall below, rather than a scored percentile. Unresolved. 4. **Undisclosed events collide with training equity.** Competitors with coaching resources will guess better. Mitigated by publishing the capability list exhaustively and keeping the event pool large. 5. **The venue network cannot reach most of the base.** At plausible growth rates there are thousands of free participants per certified venue. Either the physical tiers are reachable by a small minority, or venue growth must be far more aggressive than modelled. 6. **Spectacle pressure on the floor.** The single most likely way this degrades is a producer wanting a popular competitor kept in. The Foundation/opco split exists specifically to make that structurally impossible. Guard it. --- *v0.1 — the event designs will change. The four rules in §0 should not.*