Cyphid Academy
Cyphid Academy
Cultivating Young Potential for Heroism, Innovation and Discovery
We fast track high potential young people to contribute value in the adult economy via a training paradigm oriented around intellectual team sports.
Our mission is “to prepare tomorrow’s leaders for a future of accelerating complexity”.
Who We Are
Our community is united by its founding endeavour of Cultivating Young Potential for Heroism, Innovation and Discovery. At Cyphid, we view human potential in terms of the quality of the questions a person might ask in their lifetime if given the chance. This framing motivates us to have humility in the evaluation of human potential, acknowledging that anyone might stumble upon a profound question in some of their possible futures.
Cyphid’s founding community formed around the project of nurturing the extraordinary and often fragile potential of very high IQ children from the Australian Young Mensans community. We view IQ as one useful indicator of potential among many that happens to be easy to measure. As resources allow, we aspire to continually expand the diversity of criteria we pay attention to for recruiting new members to our academy.
Our Programs
Gamer Garage
Acting as a frontier recruitment vehicle, applicants from our wider community of allied institutions are automatically sorted, each session, into groups of 5-10 that optimise for shared interests in games and each other.
We train young adult mentors in the 16-25 age range to lead a virtual room of younger kids into cohesive play in fun social games.
Conundrums Club
Participants are divided into randomised groups each round to prepare to pitch a solution to a thought-provoking Conundrum. Randomly selected members of each group present their 1 minute pitch in random order to the entire class. Each spectating player’s private evaluation of a pitch’s quality affects their personal likelihood of being matched with players from that team in future rounds.
Battle Bunker
Coached by university-aged mentors with demonstrated coding prowess and supported by cutting edge AI assistants, teams of academy members develop AI agents called Battlesnakes that compete in a virtual arena. Randomised interviews motivate teams to ensure that every team member thoroughly understands how their AI agent works.
Cyphid Wizards (in development)
Patterned on the Ninja teams of the Naruto universe, a Cyphid Wizard team is a trio of academy members led by an adult mentor. Each team is challenged to find opportunities to create value in the adult world. The team may trade commitments of future attention with the academy in exchange for resources like money, introductions and expert mentorship to invest in current opportunities.
Our Team
Chris Hope
A former Silicon Valley software engineer from Melbourne, Chris has dedicated much of his life since 2017 to personal growth and volunteer mentorship, made possible by a fortuitous 2014 investment in Ethereum. This arc included 6 months of volunteer teaching in Tanzania, a year long meditation retreat during the 2020 Covid lockdowns and some part time consulting work in mechanism design. Since 2021 he has been hosting a growing repertoire of online programs for gifted kids in collaboration with Australian Mensa.
Eliza Hope
Born and raised in Melbourne’s South East, Eliza brings a history of making learning fun for kids and a background in emotionally intelligent leadership to her work with gifted children. Helping to innovate the marketing, communications and product development departments of industry leaders like Apple and The Global Beauty Group since 2011, she marries tech proficiency with a passion for mentorship. Eliza has been the official Gifted Children Coordinator of Mensa Victoria since January 2023.