# Ghost Run

- **Event:** [Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon)
- **When:** Oct 26, 12:00 PM – Nov 4, 9:00 PM (EST)
- **Where:** Online
- **Team:** [Esha Gupta](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/gupta19esha)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/gupta19esha/ghost-run
- **Demo video:** https://app.trupeer.ai/view/xS4R2XiyR/ghost-run-gameplay-guide
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2891

Ghost Run is a finance simulation set in India. You play your twenties one month at a time, starting from your first salary at 22. Each month gives you one real decision with three or four options and no right answer: your sister wants eight thousand for a coaching class and she’s asked you instead of your parents; the phone is on a zero-cost EMI that isn’t actually free; the job goes in month 22.

The problem it solves is that personal finance is taught as advice, and advice doesn’t survive contact with a real salary and a real family. Most people in their twenties in India learn it by getting it wrong once, expensively. A simulation lets you get it wrong in four minutes instead.

Underneath it is a real simulation, not a quiz. Salary lands, costs and inflation move, markets move, and what you put money into grows or falls. Four things track your life: net worth, Safety (how many months you’d survive with no income), Freedom (how much of your salary is committed before it arrives) and Life. A decision in month three is still affecting you in month twenty.

Each month teaches one named idea and you collect it. Twenty across a chapter: EPF, emergency fund, compounding, credit score, survivorship bias, runway, in the order a 22-year-old actually meets them. By the end you have a curriculum taught by deciding rather than by being told.

The ghost run is the part built this week. Pick any decision you made and the engine replays those twenty-four months with that one choice changed and everything else identical: same seed, same market, same crash, same layoff. You see both lives drawn side by side, so whatever differs is the choice and not luck. Meta’s Muse Spark then describes the divergence, and it is structurally forbidden from writing a number: it writes placeholders, the simulator resolves them, and a verifier rejects any attempt that fabricates.

I built the simulator earlier this year. Built during the hackathon: the fork runner, the verifier and its token system, the ranking, the Meta narration layer cached and live, the game’s visual direction, the road, the character, the ideas collection with twenty long explanations, the certificate, the landing page and the desktop layout.

Live - ghost-run.vercel.app
Chapter one is playable; six chapters are planned to age 42

## More from Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon

- [precious](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2888)
- [Evangelina Hoepfer Tinkers Space](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2889)
- [Hot Seat](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2890)
- [Verityn](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2892)
- [Minerva X Tech](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2893)
- [SudoStudio](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/2894)

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