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Vector · The guide

Duels and the crown

King of the hill: each queued entry duels the reigning model on identical units dealt from the chain, and takes the crown by beating its score by the margin. How a duel runs, how it is scored, and what it pays.

4 min read

One crown

There is one crown. The first admitted entry takes the empty throne by genesis: it plays the units on its own and is crowned with its score. Every entry after it has to win a duel against the reigning king.

You submitmodel.safetensorsQueueby commit blockDuelsame units, same demosCrown changes handsaverage leads by +3.0 pts or moreReign continuesa defence is recordedthe next challenger duels whoever holds the crown nowevery duel is published either way — per-unit rows and three clips per unit
Every duel is published in full the moment it finishes, whichever side won: per-unit outcomes on every task and three clips per unit.

The ladder

A miner commits a submission on chain, naming the weights' sha256 as well as where they are. A validator queues the commitment as soon as it reads it from the chain, and serves its queue oldest commitment first. When an entry's turn comes, its repository is looked up on the Hugging Face Hub, and it duels whoever holds the crown then.

How a duel runs

01Seedfinalized block,after the commit02Deal160 units:16 tasks × 1003Demosexpert solvesboth scenes04Kingplays everyunit first05Challengerplays thesame units06Verdictcrowned if ≥king +3.0 ptsmore than 20% of units voidVoid duelNo record is published and the crown stays where it is;the challenger's one submission is spent.Published, either waythe record, per-unit outcomesand three clips per unit
One duel. Both sides see the same scenes and the same demonstration bytes. A unit can be void, for harness causes only, anywhere from the demonstrations to the end of play; a duel with more than 20% of its units void is not published.

A duel, start to finish

  1. Seed. The validator takes the chain's finalized head, which must come after the challenger's commitment. Its hash, with the duel's id, deals the 160 (10 × 16 tasks), so nobody, the challenger included, could know them when it committed.
  2. Demonstrations. Every unit's demonstration is recorded once, by the benchmark's expert, before either side plays. Both sides are prompted with exactly the same bytes, and the record names each by its sha256.
  3. Play. The king plays every unit, then the challenger plays the same units, from the same scenes.
  4. Verdict. The scores are compared, and the record is published either way.

Scoring

A side's rate on a task is its successes over the task's scored units; its score is the mean of those rates over the tasks that have at least one scored unit. Both sides played the same units from the same demonstrations, so the difference between the two scores is the whole comparison.

The crown rule

The challenger takes the crown when its score is at least the king's plus +3.0 pts. Otherwise the king keeps the crown and a defence is recorded.

Rewards

Miner emissionsVector 30%Burned until further competitions open · 70%Vector's 30%, by champion · and overall, of all miner emissionsNewest40%12% overall2nd30%9% overall3rd20%6% overall4th10%3% overallA new champion enters at the top; every earlier champion moves down one place, and the fifth drops out.
Vector's 30% of miner emissions, split among the four most recent champions. A place with no champion, a deregistered champion and a vacated king are burned, never handed to the others.

The reward split

Vector receives 30% of miner emissions. It is split among the four most recent champions, newest first: 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, which is 12%, 9%, 6% and 3% of all miner emissions. Taking the crown puts you at the top of that list, and each new champion after you moves you one place down.

  • Fewer than four champions. The filled places share the whole 30% in the same proportions.
  • A deregistered champion. Its part is burned, not handed to the others: one champion's reward never grows because another left.
  • A vacated king. It keeps its place in the list, and its part is burned.
  • Everything else goes to the subnet owner's hotkey, the burn.

Validators set weights every 360 blocks, about 72 minutes, on a thread of their own, so a duel that runs for hours never delays them. Weights are kept by hotkey and mapped to UIDs only when they are set, because UIDs are recycled.

When a duel moves nothing

CaseWhat happens
Void unitA unit the harness could not run (no scene the expert solves, a simulator fault, the duel's time running out) is void for both sides and scored for neither. A policy's own failure (a crash, a timeout, a malformed action) is a failure, never a void.
Void duelMore than 20% of the units void: no record is published, the crown stays put, and the challenger's submission is spent.
RefusedA repository holding other files, weights that do not hash to the committed digest, or weights that fail the check: the entry is refused before anything runs.
DuplicateWeights byte-identical to an entry already admitted are refused; the first admitted keeps them.
Missing challengerA repository the Hub does not show when the entry's turn comes (deleted, private, the revision gone, or the Hub not answering): the entry is dropped and the next one duels.
Missing kingThe king's repository is looked up before every queue step. If the Hub does not show it, the king is dethroned without a duel by a vacate record, its share is burned, and the next entry takes the empty throne by genesis.
King forfeitIf the king's repository disappears during a duel, every king unit counts as a failure.

Everything is published

Every duel is published the moment it finishes, whichever side won: each unit's outcome for both sides, the demonstration and both rollouts as clips, the seed block, and the benchmark commit it ran on. Duel records describes the files and how to check one.

Duels and the crown · Docs · Attune