Introduce Tournament-Style (Knockout) Competitions for Miners

[ultrashiny]

📝 Summary

We’ll introduce football-style (knockout) tournaments for miners, where winning teams progress to the next round and losing teams are eliminated — similar to real-world football tournaments.

This structure aims to reward consistent performance and discourage miners from registering multiple low-quality nodes.

⚽ Tournament Structure

• Matches are organized in rounds (e.g., Round 1 → Quarterfinal → Semifinal → Final).
• Winning team advances to the next round.
• Losing team is eliminated from that tournament cycle.
• Top-performing miners are selected for each new competition to get rewards (2 competitions for now, Clue/Guess competitions).

🎯 Goals

• ✅ Encourage miners to focus on model quality, not just quantity.
• ✅ Prevent massive miner registrations with poor performance.
• ✅ Reward consistency and long-term engagement.
• ✅ Create a more competitive and transparent environment.

🧩 Key Rules

• Each competition round uses the existing 3-player rule (1 validator + 2 miners).
• Scores and performance from each match determine which team advances.
• Validators help host and verify matches at each stage.
• Tournament results are logged and can be displayed publicly (leaderboard-style).

✅ Acceptance Criteria

• Tournament (knockout) mode implemented.
• Miners automatically paired into rounds based on performance.
• Winning teams progress; losing teams are dropped.
• Validator selection for each round randomized and fair.
• Leaderboard or history log of tournament results.
• Docs updated to explain new format.

🧱 Tasks

• Add tournament mode flag (e.g., mode: tournament).
• Implement round generator and advancement logic.
• Store tournament states (teams, scores, rounds).
• Integrate with existing 3-player match rules.
• Add validator role for match verification.
• Display tournament standings (CLI or web).
• Update documentation and competition guidelines.

🏁 Outcome

A fairer, football-style competitive system where miners compete to advance, ensuring that skill and performance determine progress — not the number of nodes registered.

[ultrashiny]

WINNER-TAKE-ALL

[ultrashiny]

Refined mechanism: 2-stage tournament (Qualifier League + Premier League)