Ozzfan
PS - This topic has been beaten to death. I don't know why beating a dead horse is appropriate to some unless they are simply grinding their axe.

No axe to grind here, just clarifying some statements made by others about those of us who are competitive.

Winterknight
If by your wrongly conceived rules, that a project should never change the credits/task. Then a project would be allowed to start with a very badly written app, written the worse possible language and compiled on the very worse compiler they could find, then set a level that agrees with CPP.
Then a few days or weeks later introduce version 2 of the app completely hand written in assembler by the best programmers they can get, which is 100 times faster that version 1.
Because they have set their baseline for credits and by your rules do not change the credit level every one crunching for them gets 100 times the CPP level.

Don't be ________ stupid.

If you will reread my post you will see that I said the credit change due to the optimized "stock" app was appropriate and made sense. So why are you trying to belittle me over that?

Winterknight
I think you will find that the confusion arrose because a certain member of your team released a version of the enhanced app with the wrong credit multiplier. A person who has now left this project and asked why that version was still available and still being used several days if not weeks later. Admittedly his language was not correct but his observation was correct.
This displeased your team when the correct multiplier was applied, and you, and I do mean you, haven't stopped playing the same record over and over again.

Nope, wrong again. I suggest you go back and reread that whole thread before making such statements.

Why should I reduce my credits to keep in line with a project that has no real value to mankind & is totally unsupported & struggling to survive?

That's totally subjective, isn't it? What you may see as having "no real value" might be seen as valuable to many others. Who gets to decide what is more important? Under what fair system will each project be judged? What if many don't agree with the judgement? Who gets to be "right"? Why not remove such subjective debates altogether and leave it at personal preference? Providing even pay across all projects will do exactly that.

Regardless of what we all value, all BOINC based projects should try to avoid the credit hounds by making everything even and fair so that the only other way to weigh which project to join would be purely out of scientific interest. If you (generally speaking) don't feel SETI@Home is worth the time or effort, then you join a project which you feel is worth the time and effort and for no other reason. The reason to join or switch projects should never be based solely on "pay", rather the entire "payment" argument should be removed from the equation altogether.

but that's my point! There ARE crunchers out there who crunch on projects that they are generally interested in. Because of Boinc, they now have multiple choices of projects, and the problem being which one to choose. Personally, I found the answer to that question. Join a good team & join in on their POTM. That way all our crunching benefits both the project & the team, hopefully in a good natured & competitive spirit!

I've stated it before & I'll state it again. The credit debate SHOULD be only discussed by Boinc & project leaders in private. When an agreement is made then all project leaders can post that on their boards.

If CPP is introduced, I can see a very serious problem cropping up on Seti. With even parity, all projects will start to devise means to attract more crunchers, yes, even Seti. With Seti's current problems, where will the time & resources come from? If they succeed in this aspect, then they will leave themselves open to accusations as to why they couldn't do what most crunchers have asked for. Nice CATCH 22 situation isn't it?

If this happens, Seti will dig themselves such a big hole, they will never be able to climb out of, which could completely finish them off. Is this wise?

I personally think that they have opened Pandora's Box & are unable/unwilling to close it!

CPP was introduced on day one of BOINC, it is just that some projects have not followed the rules or have weak leadership, that when they found they were outside the BOINC parameters and tried to adjust to the correct level, some of the participants there complained so loud the management crumbled.
And on at least one project, at least for a while, because there was no validation at the BOINC level, it was done later by the back end science, you got what you claimed. At that time it was easy because of the Trux clients where you could adjust the benchmark scores to get close to the correct claims. Unfortunately it didn't stop overclaiming. Thats why you will find third party clients are banned or frown upon at some projects.

Cross-Project Parity follows directly from the definition of a cobblestone.

A cobblestone is 1/100th of the work produced by a machine of a given specification.

If you run any project on that 100 cobblestone machine, it should produce 100 cobblestones.

This is not subject to argument, because it comes directly from the definition of a cobblestone.

If you are arguing about the rate credit is issued, then you are arguing that the cobblestone, as defined, is the wrong unit of credit -- that we need a different economy.

That may be true, but it's a different argument. If the cobblestone is the "gold" standard, then cross-project parity is a given.

I don't think there is evil in the projects that overpay or underpay. I think that they start out, they throw a guess into the scaling factors, they get a fairly good application going, and at that point, they're so busy with launching the project that they miss a step (adjusting their credit to the standard).

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I don't think there is evil in the projects that overpay or underpay. I think that they start out, they throw a guess into the scaling factors, they get a fairly good application going, and at that point, they're so busy with launching the project that they miss a step (adjusting their credit to the standard).

Agreed. Its easy to get so busy doing one thing that you forget about another. Its an easy oversight, but one that can still be corrected, and I believe it should be up to the head BOINC person to give those projects a reminder - or better yet, take the burden away and come up with an automated solution so they can focus on more important things.

Wasn't an automated solution suggested? Something about putting the multiplier into the splitters so that they would exist within the workunits themselves?

How? With so many project hopping via POTM's, it won't be easy to determine!

That's the current predicament. One way to determine how is by keeping up with all the major teams out there, find out what their POTM is, and excluding them from the stats calculation (since, theoretically, they really haven't "left" the project in so much as they will be back eventually). That requires manpower, and SETI has so little of that. That doesn't mean SETI can't try to reach deep into their bag of goodies and try to reach out to past SETI crunchers trying to get some people back.

Thanks Ozzfan. An excellent answer & appreciated. Also @ Ned Ludd, your answer appreciated.

Ozzfan, in a previous post on this thread, you stated that more fun is needed.

Quite agree, but how? In posts past, the admin have stated that the forums are a waste of time & that there was a vote on whether or not to discontinue them, yet they send out mass e-mails requesting users to come back!

The majority of crunchers I believe are not the "PBI" from the 1st World War & have intelligence to think for themselves.

Taking all these threads/posts into account, it just shows how hypocritical the project is.
All I can see is the Deaf leading the Dumb, & the Dumb ordering the Blind!

For any DC project to be successful, communication is a 2 way street, with both parties admitting their mistakes & moving on to help the project achieve even more success.

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2. Those of us that are competitive will not stop project hopping (as someone called it) even if the credits were exactly the same on each project. Being the competitors we are, we have to maintain and gain positions on all of our projects, which means we will be constantly shifting resources from one project to another.

Not to the same extent as would occur if one project offered 10% more credits per hour than another.
Those that crunch for credits go where the most credits per hour are. If the number of credits per hour is the same regardless of project, there's no point in moving from one project to another, other than the cruncher's personal whims.

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Grant
Darwin NT

In posts past, the admin have stated that the forums are a waste of time & that there was a vote on whether or not to discontinue them,

The statement was that the forums were taking many of them away from doing their jobs- actual work on the project- but it was agreeed they do serve a usefull purpose even though their time could be better spent doing work & not dealing with people's squabbles on the forums.

yet they send out mass e-mails requesting users to come back!

I don't see how having or or not having the forums has any bearing on asking people to come back.
They want people to come back & crunch, they don't want people coming back just to bicker & flame each other on the forums.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Taking all these threads/posts into account, it just shows how hypocritical the project is.
All I can see is the Deaf leading the Dumb, & the Dumb ordering the Blind!

For any DC project to be successful, communication is a 2 way street, with both parties admitting their mistakes & moving on to help the project achieve even more success.

Never ascribe to Malice what is equally explained by overwork.

SETI@Home is what, 3 full time people, a volunteer or two, a couple of scientists who have other work above and beyond SETI, and that's about it.

... and it's incredibly easy to take something that happened, and turn it into a group of ivory-tower intellectuals staying up to all hours of the day and night trying to dream up ways to stick-it-to the crunchers.

That just doesn't make sense.

If you want better communication, then we're going to have to donate enough for SETI to pay for more staff-time so they can talk to us.

I'd rather my donation went to programmer time, so we can see the results from the NTPCKR, and better servers so we don't have to listen to the bitching when the antique hardware quits.

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WHY?

Scenario: -

I'm a project admin & devise a project where results provide some answers for mankind. The WU's are of a reasonable length & I decide to award 100 credits per wu. Crunchers flock to my project & after a short period, I get the credit debate on my forum. I delete said posts & state that crunchers either help the project or leave. I'm pretty sure that there are users out there who will crunch my project regardless.

On a regular basis, information is posted for all crunchers to see how well the project is doing. My project is well funded & secure.

CPP - 2B or Not 2B? That is the Question!

Why should I reduce my credits to keep in line with a project that has no real value to mankind & is totally unsupported & struggling to survive?

Excellent scenario.

Why would any project not want to use credits as an added incentive to attract users? Perhaps only those who run BOINC projects just for practice or development, but not doing any real science.

Other then appealing to a project admin's sense of fair play, what means does David Anderson & Co. have to enforce CPP? He can appeal to the stats collecting sites to not import stats for the "rogue" project, but again, what other means does he have to enforce their actions? None. He threw the BOINC platform out there into the open source world. What gets done with it is out of his control.

It will only take a couple of projects ignoring CPP and David's powerless mandates to start a credit inflation that will render stats parity a pipedream.
As it should be.

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In any case, it is the intent of open source to have improvements incorporate back into the stock code, and I intend to keep that feedback working. The goal is to get the work done, and although credits can be fun I simply am unable to really understand why they become so important to some participants.

                                                              Joe

I have to agree that the primary goal is to get the work done. The reason credits have become so important is that there is NOTHING ELSE here to gauge your own work or the work of the entire project. NOTHING!!

Its understandable that some people are competitive, but given that, shouldn't devoting more power to the project be truly competitive and not simply using better code? It would almost seem like cheating to me, not that I'm against using such apps, but when using those apps and being competitive and then complaining when your advantage is taken away just seems wrong to me.

It would be like going to a paint ball tournament one year and bringing a fully automatic weapon while everyone else uses pistols. Then the next year they officially allow the automatics and you complain because everyone else is using them.

So you think it is just fine that other projects give more credit for the same time...Hmmm I will run seti only either way but totally disagree with you. If other projects are open source their people could do the same thing with optimizations and if not then too bad.

No, my comment was about optimized apps vs. stock apps, not about different projects. I do not think its OK for other projects to give more credit than others. I agree with the cross project parity (CPP) concept in that all projects should offer the same amount of credit in their stock apps. Optimized apps (regardless of project) are usually considered unofficial and are therefore out of the realm of control of CPP. If other projects open their code to receive the same benefits that SETI@Home currently enjoys in the open source community, then they can get more science done too. And if they decide to make some of those improvements official, then they would have to reduce their multiplier too so as to remain constant with CPP.

Other open source projects? Are there any besides Seti anymore? Einstein I think used to be, They hired the only Einstein optimizer that I know of and soon after that went closed source and the optimizations didn't appear in the new closed source app and Einstein wasn't exactly compatible with 64 bit Boinc or very quick then, Retreating Glaciers seem quicker to Me. All Seti needs to is to acquire the new code and then why be open source anymore? After all they have the code and It wouldn't have cost them any money to develop It, To integrate It sure, But to get It nothing. If Seti died or went closed source I'd just close down and sell off the extra 3 PCs. Do I believe It would happen? I don't know as I don't have a Ouija board. I think what happened is most that do Seti only do Seti and felt a bit betrayed(stabbed in the back comes to mind as a phrase) back then, Einstein also did one other thing when they went closed source, Besides issuing a new app which was slower than molasses, they also didn't allow the old open source apps to crunch the data anymore.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Taking all these threads/posts into account, it just shows how hypocritical the project is.
All I can see is the Deaf leading the Dumb, & the Dumb ordering the Blind!

For any DC project to be successful, communication is a 2 way street, with both parties admitting their mistakes & moving on to help the project achieve even more success.

Never ascribe to Malice what is equally explained by overwork.

SETI@Home is what, 3 full time people, a volunteer or two, a couple of scientists who have other work above and beyond SETI, and that's about it.

... and it's incredibly easy to take something that happened, and turn it into a group of ivory-tower intellectuals staying up to all hours of the day and night trying to dream up ways to stick-it-to the crunchers.

That just doesn't make sense.

If you want better communication, then we're going to have to donate enough for SETI to pay for more staff-time so they can talk to us.

I'd rather my donation went to programmer time, so we can see the results from the NTPCKR, and better servers so we don't have to listen to the bitching when the antique hardware quits.

But this is exactly the point of the thread title. There are those of us who just want to crunch & pick projects via teams POTM - not to see bitching about credits/lack of news/progress/forum shutdowns/flaming/insults/knockdowns/banishments/thread disarrays/cruncher-mod disputes/etc,etc,etc.

It comes back to no forums = no crunching - how can one crunch for something with no knowledge or help available?

Leaving aside those projects that are still in beta, look at the more successful ones with their front ends - Info available, whether or not one is a scientist, info IS available.

IT IS down to the admin to police the forums. Yes, I know they do not have the time, so it's time to introduce hard & fast rules & give mods a bit more power.

This site needs to return to a more pleasant atmosphere, which in turn should bring back more crunchers, which is what the admin what.

Just my 2 cents worth!

PS: I'm not taking anything away from the hard pressed people of the project. I agree with Ned that for what they have, they have done extremely well. All I'm saying is please cut out the double standards, they benefit no one in the end!

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2. Those of us that are competitive will not stop project hopping (as someone called it) even if the credits were exactly the same on each project. Being the competitors we are, we have to maintain and gain positions on all of our projects, which means we will be constantly shifting resources from one project to another.

Not to the same extent as would occur if one project offered 10% more credits per hour than another.
Those that crunch for credits go where the most credits per hour are. If the number of credits per hour is the same regardless of project, there's no point in moving from one project to another, other than the cruncher's personal whims.

See, you are missing the point of the competition. Sure, we would like to have more credits, but we are still going to move from project to project to gain position and try to maintain that position regardless of what the credits are set at. If a project offers more credit, that just means we have to have our resources tied up there for a shorter time to make those gains, but we will still move on at some point to protect our gains in other projects. That is the purpose of the PoTM and or internal Team races, to improve ones position in a certain project. So the movement of resources is going to happen to the same extent as it does now regardless of CPP or any other credit mechanism.

2. Those of us that are competitive will not stop project hopping (as someone called it) even if the credits were exactly the same on each project. Being the competitors we are, we have to maintain and gain positions on all of our projects, which means we will be constantly shifting resources from one project to another.

Not to the same extent as would occur if one project offered 10% more credits per hour than another.
Those that crunch for credits go where the most credits per hour are. If the number of credits per hour is the same regardless of project, there's no point in moving from one project to another, other than the cruncher's personal whims.

See, you are missing the point of the competition. Sure, we would like to have more credits, but we are still going to move from project to project to gain position and try to maintain that position regardless of what the credits are set at. If a project offers more credit, that just means we have to have our resources tied up there for a shorter time to make those gains, but we will still move on at some point to protect our gains in other projects. That is the purpose of the PoTM and or internal Team races, to improve ones position in a certain project. So the movement of resources is going to happen to the same extent as it does now regardless of CPP or any other credit mechanism.

And I think you're missing my point- while there may be those that have the odd competition at accumulatiing points within a given project, the majority of those that crunch for credits appear to do so for their overall BOINC total- not a project total. Hence if one project gives out significantly more credits per hour than other projects then those that crunch for credit will go there.

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Grant
Darwin NT

It will only take a couple of projects ignoring CPP and David's powerless mandates to start a credit inflation that will render stats parity a pipedream.
As it should be.

Have you ever heard of hyper inflation? It's not desirable; so to say it's the way things should be is a rather strange outlook.

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Grant
Darwin NT

This site needs to return to a more pleasant atmosphere, which in turn should bring back more crunchers, which is what the admin what.

I would be interested to know what percentage of active crunchers that actually frequent the forums is- my personal guess is less than 1%, may be 0.5%?
Some people might leave when things get stupid here, or they might do what i do & just not bother coming here for a while, but i don't see it having any significant influence in whether or not people cruch for Seti.

If people are having problems, then being able to get help would be a big factor in them staying on. But i suspect that most people just install the software, fiddle with it for a bit & then leave it at that.

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Grant
Darwin NT

2. Those of us that are competitive will not stop project hopping (as someone called it) even if the credits were exactly the same on each project. Being the competitors we are, we have to maintain and gain positions on all of our projects, which means we will be constantly shifting resources from one project to another.

Not to the same extent as would occur if one project offered 10% more credits per hour than another.
Those that crunch for credits go where the most credits per hour are. If the number of credits per hour is the same regardless of project, there's no point in moving from one project to another, other than the cruncher's personal whims.

See, you are missing the point of the competition. Sure, we would like to have more credits, but we are still going to move from project to project to gain position and try to maintain that position regardless of what the credits are set at. If a project offers more credit, that just means we have to have our resources tied up there for a shorter time to make those gains, but we will still move on at some point to protect our gains in other projects. That is the purpose of the PoTM and or internal Team races, to improve ones position in a certain project. So the movement of resources is going to happen to the same extent as it does now regardless of CPP or any other credit mechanism.

And I think you're missing my point- while there may be those that have the odd competition at accumulatiing points within a given project, the majority of those that crunch for credits appear to do so for their overall BOINC total- not a project total. Hence if one project gives out significantly more credits per hour than other projects then those that crunch for credit will go there.

And your supporting facts for this statement are?? My supporting facts are all of the competitive teams out there that are constantly moving from project to project. Case in point, have you checked the Formula BOINC competition lately? I thought not. L'alliance FrancoPhone, BOINC Synergy, SETI.USA, SETI.Germany and many other competitive teams in that competition. The basis of Formula BOINC is to be in the top 8 of as many projects as you can to try to be in the top 3 by the end of the year. You cannot do that by sitting on a project because it gives a few more points per WU.

It will only take a couple of projects ignoring CPP and David's powerless mandates to start a credit inflation that will render stats parity a pipedream.
As it should be.

Have you ever heard of hyper inflation? It's not desirable; so to say it's the way things should be is a rather strange outlook.

The point is that CPP is a hopeless fantasy, and all the talk in the world won't make it happen, and it's NOT ENFORCABLE!

Let the projects set the credits where they like, and the teams and individuals can compete within the projects, and the projects can compete for contributors however they like.

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It will only take a couple of projects ignoring CPP and David's powerless mandates to start a credit inflation that will render stats parity a pipedream.
As it should be.

Have you ever heard of hyper inflation? It's not desirable; so to say it's the way things should be is a rather strange outlook.

The point is that CPP is a hopeless fantasy, and all the talk in the world won't make it happen, and it's NOT ENFORCEABLE!

Let the projects set the credits where they like, and the teams and individuals can compete within the projects, and the projects can compete for contributors however they like.

I agree on CPP being a hopeless fantasy, Do I care about formula Boinc? No, It's just not My cup of tea, I do like to crunch WU's fast, But that's just Me liking to tweak My PCs hardware.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Let the projects set the credits where they like, and the teams and individuals can compete within the projects, and the projects can compete for contributors however they like.

Ah, an Anarchist.
Cross Project Parity, like equality amongst people will never be possible. But it is worth striving for.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Let the projects set the credits where they like, and the teams and individuals can compete within the projects, and the projects can compete for contributors however they like.

Ah, an Anarchist.
Cross Project Parity, like equality amongst people will never be possible. But it is worth striving for.

It's not worth wasting precious resources trying to get to an impossible place.

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Let the projects set the credits where they like, and the teams and individuals can compete within the projects, and the projects can compete for contributors however they like.

Ah, an Anarchist.
Cross Project Parity, like equality amongst people will never be possible. But it is worth striving for.

It's not worth wasting precious resources trying to get to an impossible place.

I don't think its impossible - close enough is good enough for me.