REAX / COMPETITIONS / FAQ / HISTORY
Miner FAQ history
How the miner FAQ changed from its first publication to version 2.16. The rules in force are in the current miner FAQ; this page is a record and does not change them.
Earlier versions
Each version stays available unchanged: version 1, version 2, version 2.1, version 2.2, version 2.3, version 2.4, version 2.5, version 2.6, version 2.7, version 2.8, version 2.9, version 2.10, version 2.11, version 2.12, version 2.13, version 2.14, version 2.15, version 2.16, version 2.17, version 3.0, version 3.0.1, version 3.1, version 3.2, version 3.3, version 3.3.1, version 3.3.2, version 3.4, version 3.5, version 3.6.
Announced in #92: the miner FAQ; the crowning slot rules; eval v5 and FAQ version 2.
Change log, versions 1 to 2.16
| Version | Date | Type | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.16 | 26 October 2026, 19:01 UTC | clarification | Clarification of the 2.15 hotfix (provisional start): the 24-hour window before we have reached your repo is for real models only. A commitment that is not a loadable model (the committed revision does not exist, no safetensors weights, weights identical to the declared base model, or a Hugging Face revision different from the committed one) gets no such window, and its coldkey gets none for 30 days; a coldkey with two such commitments in 30 days gets no provisional keep-alive. A private repo is not affected: it keeps its 24 hours. Honest entries change nothing. Version 2.15 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.15/. |
| 2.15 | 26 October 2026, 16:55 UTC | hotfix | Hotfix, applies at once (what a hotfix is): no UID is deregistered just because its entry is waiting. The keep-alive now covers every waiting state from the first weight set after the commitment until the decision (keep-alive, provisional start, engine). Fairness check. Why now: the old windows failed honest miners. On 26 October a former champion was pruned about four hours after committing a new entry; in the 7 days before, five more waiting entries were pruned at zero weight (two pending confirmation cut by the 8-entry limit, one queued, one engine entry after 16 hours of waiting for our measurement). Who is affected: only waiting entries gain a small weight (half or one median miner weight each); results, scores, ranks and award rules do not change. The total stays inside the existing caps (a quarter of a track share for all keep-alives of the track, 5% for provisional and engine ones), so other miners lose at most a fraction of a percent of weight while entries wait. Why not wait: every day under the old windows can cost an honest miner a UID and a new registration. Nobody loses anything that was earned under the old text. |
| 2.14 | 26 October 2026, 15:14 UTC | clarification | Clarification, not a rule change: new answer How do I make my engine entry award-ready before it is crowned?, a checklist of what the award review checks (public source of every closed native, exact build line and toolchain, identical files, where to put the repository link, parents and hotkey labels, no weight-like files). It links to published source. Nothing else changes; version 2.13 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.13/. |
| 2.13 | 26 October 2026, 14:58 UTC | hotfix (date change of an announced rule) | Hotfix, applies at once (what a hotfix is): the generalist commit cutoff of 6 hours announced in version 2.12 applies from the Thursday 29 October 2026, 14:30 UTC slot, not from Monday 2 November. For Thursday 29 October the cutoff is 08:30 UTC (commit cutoff). Only the date changes; the 6 hours, the keep-alive for a held entry (keep-alive) and everything else from 2.12 stay. Fairness check. Why now: until Monday 2 November, the gap lets a light fine-tune of a just-published leader enter the same slot, so the Thursday 29 October slot would still be open to exactly that. Who is affected: an entry whose commitment is first seen on chain after Thursday 29 October, 08:30 UTC plays the Monday 2 November slot instead; its evaluation runs as always and nobody loses a measured result, score or weight. Entries committed by 08:30 UTC are unaffected. Version 2.12 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.12/. |
| 2.12 | 26 October 2026, 14:08 UTC | rule change (announced) + new rule class | Two things. (1) New rule class, LIVE from publication: What is a hotfix, and how is it different from a normal rule change? When a current rule demonstrably fails, the fix applies at once, with a written fairness check for good-faith miners published together with it; normal rule changes keep the announced-in-advance rollout, and a pointer was added to section 1 of the slot rules. (2) Announced rule change, generalist commit cutoff of 6 hours, from the Monday 2 November 2026, 14:30 UTC slot (the Thursday 29 October slot keeps the current rules): an entry plays a slot only if its commitment was first seen on chain at least 6 hours before it; a confirmed entry held for the next slot keeps its confirmed-entry keep-alive until that slot (keep-alive). Not retroactive. Version 2.11 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.11/. |
| 2.11 | 26 October 2026, 13:01 UTC | clarification + new answer | New answer Which base models do you recommend for the generalist track?: our recommended bases (Gemma-4-31B line, baselabs/mammoth-1, the abstention recipe), announced in #92 on 26 October 2026 (#92 announcement). A recommendation, not a rule change: no rule, date, bar, margin or limit changes, and pplx- and REAX-based entries stay fully eligible. Version 2.10 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.10/. |
| 2.10 | 26 October 2026, 12:01 UTC | clarification | Clarification, not a rule change: new answer Which weights, reference engines and release does Engine rules v2.0 use? lists the pinned Hugging Face revision and the reference image of every v2.0 model slot, how the weights are mounted, the validator release (v1.2.0-rc11.post8) and how to measure an image locally. Nothing else changes; version 2.9 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.9/. |
| 2.9 | 26 October 2026, 09:18 UTC | rule change (announced) | Engine rules v2.0 from Tuesday 27 October 2026, 14:30 UTC (right after that slot; the Tuesday 27 October slot is still decided under Engine rules v1); first crowning under v2.0 Friday 30 October 2026, 14:30 UTC. The engine track measures the current and next decisionmodels.io lineup with the weights in What changes with Engine rules v2.0?; Plumb-4B leaves the track. Quantisation, same-session parent and the copy check start Tuesday 27 October as announced, together with v2.0. Standing rollout rule added to the slot rules (section 1). Correction: the same-session parent rule was published on this page on 24 October and announced in #92 on 26 October. Not retroactive; version 2.8 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.8/. |
| 2.8 | 25 October 2026, 09:21 UTC | clarification | Clarification, not a rule change, in May I reuse another engine entry’s code or binaries?: how to fill the ai.reax.engine.parents label. It is per file origin: list each file under the entry where that content first appeared; the bars apply to every declared or detected parent; if you would need more than 8 parents, message me before you commit. Nothing else changes; version 2.7 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.7/. |
| 2.7 | 25 October 2026, 08:09 UTC | clarification | Crowning switch time aligned with the #92 announcement of 25 October: from Monday 26 October 2026, 19:00 UTC (20:00 Berlin), confirmed engine challengers wait for the first slot, Tuesday 27 October 2026, 14:30 UTC (15:30 Berlin). Nothing else changes; version 2.6 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.6/. |
| 2.6 | 25 October 2026, 00:44 UTC | rule change (announced) | Two announced changes for the REAX Engine track, both from Tuesday 27 October 2026, 14:30 UTC (15:30 Berlin), not retroactive. (1) New answer Can my engine use FP8, INT8, NVFP4/MXFP4 or a repack of the weights?: any re-encoding of the pinned model is allowed if the engine derives it at start inside the container from the read-only pinned weights at /model, using code shipped in the image; images that ship weight-like data are not admitted; calibration is calibration-free or computed at start on the public seed set; the correctness gate is unchanged, and a private holdout set of 64 items per session with the same gates is added with the Friday 30 October 2026 release. Entries that ship weight files keep their titles and awards, and have until the Friday 30 October 14:30 UTC slot to submit a compliant version; from that slot on only compliant entries can take the title. (2) How does the engine title work?: the engine title changes only at fixed slots, every Tuesday and Friday at 14:30 UTC, starting Tuesday 27 October 2026; measurements keep running automatically (When is my engine measured?). The live page shows the next engine slot. Version 2.5 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.5/. |
| 2.5 | 24 October 2026, 15:18 UTC | rule change (announced) | Announced change in May I reuse another engine entry’s code or binaries?: from 27 October 2026, 14:30 UTC (validator release rc11.post5), when a derived engine entry clears the champion bar but falls short of, or lands within the margin of, its parent’s stored line, the parent’s best image is measured right after it on the same machine with the same items, and that session’s line uses the parent’s same-session score (never below its lowest valid score). Not retroactive. Status update in Does an engine entry need published source?: no engine award is held for missing source today. Version 2.4 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.4/. |
| 2.4 | 24 October 2026, 12:05 UTC | clarification | Clarification, not a new rule, in What counts as a copy or a derived entry?: the copy, derived and near-champion checks apply to what a model computes, so a function-preserving reparametrisation (for example rescaling MLP channels) is judged as the underlying weights. Also noted there as a separate, dated change: from validator release rc11.post5 (not before 26 October 2026, 14:30 UTC) the automatic check undoes such rescaling itself. Version 2.3 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.3/. |
| 2.3 | 23 October 2026, 19:30 UTC | clarification + status update | New answer When is my engine measured? in the REAX Engine track section: a reviewed engine entry is measured automatically, and a daily batch at 12:00 UTC catches anything left. Status updates, no rule changed: the rule changes of 23 October 2026, 13:00 UTC (draw size, award timing, engine copy line, places 2 and 3 of the generalist opening) are active, the first weight set under them was block 9346668 (about 13:55 UTC), and places 2 and 3 (UID 160, UID 113) are LIVE. Eval v5: the Monday 26 October slot still crowns on the current evaluation, every slot candidate also gets a v5 score on one common draw, and the v5 format, dev set and reference scorer are public (when v5 binds, v5 scores in the slot, where they are). Berlin-time note corrected for the change to winter time on 25 October. Version 2.2 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.2/. |
| 2.2 | 23 October 2026, 08:55 UTC | clarification | One entry per holder (slot rules, section 4, and the tied-group and coldkey answers): entries with the same coldkey or the same Hugging Face account or organisation in the repo id have the same holder, also through a chain (A shares a coldkey with B, B shares an HF account with C: A, B and C are one holder). Same rule, clearer words; the code has always grouped holders transitively. Version 2.1 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2.1/. |
| 2.1 | 23 October 2026, 08:15 UTC | clarification | Same rules, clearer words: evaluation runs all the time and results appear on the live page right away; only crowning waits for a slot. Short note added at the top of the crowning slot rules and in When is the next generalist crowning? Version 2 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v2/. |
| 2 | 23 October 2026, 05:25 UTC | rule change | Eval v5 binds from Monday 26 October 2026, 14:30 UTC (15:30 Berlin), although its second validation check narrowly missed two of our own bars; version 1 said v5 binds only after a passed check. We decided this because v5 ranks models far closer to the Decision Indexes than the current evaluation does (numbers in the answer). Monday’s slot itself still runs on the current evaluation; the slots from Thursday 29 October use v5. What v5 version 0.1 measures was updated (answer). Announced in #92 (link above) more than 48 hours before the first v5 slot. The v5 numbers are listed in one place (answer), as promised in version 1: no separate floors and no gap penalty under v5, a gap check instead, margin floor 1.0. |
| 2 | 23 October 2026, 05:25 UTC | clarification | The tie rule numbers approved on 22 October 2026 (tie gap 0.5 points from the leader, separation margin the larger of 1.0 point and 2 paired standard errors, up to three shared rounds; published in version 1 at 19:55 UTC) are unchanged; this version states that the tie gap is also 0.5 points under v5, because v5 keeps the margin floor of 1.0. The v5 item format, dev set and reference scorer are now public and linked (answer). Version 1 stays available unchanged at /competitions/faq/v1/. |
| 1 | 22 October 2026, 17:30 UTC | first publication | Miner FAQ published as its own page; the answers formerly on the rules page moved here (their old links still work). The crowning slot rules and the answers that follow from them were added on 22 October 2026, 19:55 UTC as part of this first publication, before any slot under them. |
Other pages: Miner FAQ · Competition rules · Live evaluation queue.