News·Opentensor Blog·May 29, 2024, 22:42 UTC

Weight Copying in Bittensor

Summary This article provides the context and background on the issue of weight copying in Bittensor. It describes the updates we are making to the Bittensor protocol to address this issue. This article accompanies the release of Bittensor 7.0.1 that is available in the testchain 1.1.0. This version of the testchain implements these updates. Also being released is a technical paper formalizing the weight copying problem. Introduction In 1906 at a county fair in England, Francis Galton conducted an experiment. He held a competition in which attendees would submit their best guess of the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. The person who had the best guess would get the meat. Eight hundred people participated and Galton found that the median guess was within 1% of the actual weight of 1198 pounds. This phenomenon is known as the wisdom of crowds. It underlies much of the current success of decentralized systems. Individuals observe the same phenomena, yet their perceptions are not all the same. There is an unknown amount of variability in their reports, often considered as noise, that tends to be canceled out when taking some aggregate over all observations. This form of collective intelligence had been tested extensively in the 20th century, with many early experiments finding success when the task was to make a discrete estimate of a continuous quantity: Simple things like estimating the number of jellybeans in a jar, or the temperature of the room. In his 2004 book titled The Wisdom of Crowds, author James Surowiecki recounts its use to find a lost submarine: In 1968, when the submarine Scorpion went down in the north Atlantic, the navy had only the most general idea of where it was. Yet, using the expertise of various experts in diverse disciplines, and combining them through mathematical formulas, a naval officer managed to determine its resting place within 220 yards. More recently researchers have shown that the wisdom of crowds effect extends successfully

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