What weights are, and why judging is the whole game
This lesson is about the one number a judge actually submits, and why so much rides on it.
A weight is a validator's grade for one miner, written as a share of that judge's total judgment across everyone it is grading — not a fixed score out of ten, but a proportion: this much of my attention goes here, relative to everyone else I am grading. [source]
Submitting these numbers, over and over, for everyone being judged on a contest is, mechanically, the entire job of this role — there is no other lever to pull. [source]
Judging matters because these numbers are the input, not a footnote: at the end of each judging period the chain takes every judge's numbers and turns them directly into who gets paid what, on both sides of the arrangement. [source] [source]
How it actually works
A validator's raw scores are clipped to the subnet's max-weight limit, normalized so they sum to a fixed total, and quantized into 16-bit integers before they ever reach the chain — the reference implementation is normalize in bittensor.intents. [source]
Submission goes through one call, set-weights, which also decides the path: plain weights if the subnet has commit-reveal turned off, or a timelock-encrypted commit — automatically decrypted by the chain later — if it is on; a later lesson covers why that encryption exists. [source]