Simple Metaculus forecasting bot

This repository contains a simple bot meant to get you started with creating your own bot for the AI Forecasting Tournament.

Getting started

Run the bot locally

Clone the repository. Find your terminal and run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/Metaculus/metac-bot

If you forked the repository first, you have to replace the url in the git clone command with the url to your fork. Just go to your forked repository and copy the url from the address bar in the browser.

Installing dependencies

Make sure you have python and poetry installed (poetry is a python package manager).

Inside the terminal, go to the directory you cloned the repository into and run the following command:

poetry install

to install all required dependencies.

Setting environment variables

Locally

Running the bot requires various environment variables. If you run the bot locally, the easiest way to set them is to create a file called .env in the root directory of the repository and add the variables in the following format:

METACULUS_TOKEN=1234567890 # register your bot to get a here: https://www.metaculus.com/aib/
PERPLEXITY_API_KEY=1234567890 # optional, if you want to use perplexity.ai

Github Actions

If you want to automate running the bot using github actions, you have to fork the repository and then set the environment variables in the github repository settings. Go to (Settings -> Secrets and variables -> Actions) and set API keys as secrets.

Running the bot

To run the simple bot, execute the following command in your terminal:

poetry run python simple-forecast-bot.py

Make sure to set the environment variables as described above and to set the parameters in the code to your liking. In particular, to submit predictions, make sure that submit_predictions is set to True.

Automating the bot using Github Actions

Github can automatically run code in a repository. To that end, you need to fork this repository. You also need to set the secrets and environment variables in the github repository settings as explained above.

Automation is handled in the .github/workflows/ folder.

The daily_run_simple_bot.yaml file runs the simple bot every day (note that since submit_predictions is set to False in the script by default, no predictions will actually be posted). The daily_run_simple_bot.yaml file contains various comments and explanations. You should be able to simply copy this file and modify it to run your own bot.