There was plenty of chance for UCB to remove ovbious cheats, and there *were* accounts that were zeroed. At some point, they gave up doing that - perhaps when Dr. A left for a while?

No.. I was dealing with those and gave up because (1) each "cheat check" on a user would clobber the science database (scanning for redundancy) and take a long time, (2) I had higher priority things to work on. Plus, as time wore on Classic work became more and more redundant and it became more difficult to differentiate between cheaters and legitimate users who just happened to send in excessively redundant work.

When discussing "what we'd do differently?" in SETI@home Classic after we shut it down, high on the list was: overly redundant work. Back then we had a fear of pissing off users with lack of work to crunch, but really it ended up creating more headaches than curing them.

However, it still remains that SETI Classic and the first phase of SETI under BOINC is essentially the same project. The scores should be combined in whatever manner is still possible.

I know there is much disagreement about how credit works, but I would like to see an end to the debate about how to deal with Classic credit. It shows up in your user stats as Classic credit. We will update all user accounts to reflect this Classic credit in the new BOINC accounts soon. There is no way to translate Classic credit into BOINC credit. BOINC credit is more fair and accurate than Classic. This is how it's going to be.

But credit is what keeps the masses crunching. Take away scores and watch your participation drop like a rock.

Yep. I think everybody who has ever worked on SETI@home software understands this. Hence all the leader boards, the teams, etc. Some people are in it for the science, some for the credit, some both, some because the screensaver is pretty, etc. It's all good, and it all helps the project keep going.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Now that we're all here together and ready to start a completely new version, let's start the stats over as well. Other projects have done such - F@H is one notable if I remember right.

They did.
Boinc credits started from 0.

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Grant
Darwin NT

The above litany was part of the discussion that generated the no conversion ruling.

As far as you're stating that something's impossible there will always be those who don't believe you. That's just human's nature. And the problem is deceptively seems so simple to solve. All you need to do is to find a "magical universal conversion factor". As simple as to invent a perpetuum mobile.

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Kitty@SETI team (Russia). Our cats also want to know if there is ETI out there

Angus, ask yourself one tiny question: Are you volunteering your spare cpu cycles for science or for a credit score?

kev

That's an easy one - that i've answered in public forums many times.

The credit, and only the credit. If that offends those that are in it only for the science - too bad. But credit is what keeps the masses crunching. Take away scores and watch your participation drop like a rock.

Maybe it would...probably it wouldn't. Obviously it would fall, but how far and for how long is a question that won't be answered any time soon if at all.

I see you started Classic in May 1999. That's about 5 months earlier than I did. As of March 15, 2005 I had 10319 WUs. That's well over 2000+ more than you did. Nyah Nyah Nyah!

It took me almost 3 years to get my first 250 WUs crunched. Nobody ever clued me in that the screensaver graphics chewed up so much cpu that could have been used for crunching instead. If I had known that, I could have finished Classic with 30-50% more WUs than I did. Did I wail and gnash my teeth over all the lost cpu cycles and WU counts? No! I tuned up my system (only one at that time) and doubled my WU count within 6 months.

Am I proud of my WU count? You betcha.

Would I have done it without the credit? You betcha.

Because I believed/believe in the ultimate goal. Now that I have BOINC installed (partially since July 2004; 3 of 4 systems since January 2005; and 100% since Dec 5 2005) on all my machines am I going to crunch exclusively for Seti? Absolutely not! I've been crunching for Einstein@home since January 18, 2005. I plan to add Orbit@home when a Windows client is available and I just might crunch for Africa@home if they ever get a viable client made as well.

You see, I believe in the concept of Distributed Computing. For me, credit is merely a way of monitoring my systems and their performance, not seeing who has the biggest...eh ego, or the deepest pockets.

Live long, crunch well...for whatever reason.

---

Final Classic total: 11446 WU
Classic CPU hours: 72,366

Ok. My 2 cents to all those people out there who have nothing better to do than whine about credit is this:
SHUT UP!
Classic credit score computation: Set in stone.
BOINC credit score computation: Set in stone.
Classic: Apples.
BOINC: Oranges or bananas or whatever fruit makes you happy and not whine.
Classic: Oil
BOINC: Water
Classic: Men (or women depending on if you favor/not favor)
BOINC: Women (or men, same reason)
THEY'RE NOT THE SAME! THEY NEVER WILL BE! And contrary to popular belief or desire, they can NOT be mixed no matter how hard you try. You can not change apples to oranges. You can not change oil to water. And you can not change men to women (there is always the tell-tale Y chromosome). If you're going to whine about credit, good-bye. C-ya. Uninstall the program from your machine and call it quits. There's plenty of people lined up to take your work units as illustrated by the recent server drains. So, get the picture. We don't NEED you.
Now that said, I should clarify. We may not NEED you, but we do WANT you to still be in the project. Also, this project is more than just finding ET. I mean, think about it. IF we find a signal that's viable, and IF it turns out to be an I Love Zarg episode, and IF we manage to decode something from it, that signal traveled thousands of light years to reach us and chances are, that civilization is gone. Chances are that star is gone too. So what's the use? This project isn't just about ET. BOINC isn't just about SETI. It's about changing our definition of what a "super-computer" can be. When they started the idea for S@H, do you think they presented the idea of finding ET to get funding? No. The funders would have laughed them out the door. Now present a project that creates a "super-computer" out of spare cycles of people around the globe, and people start to listen. That's what classic did. Now that project is shown it's muscle and they're not impressed anymore. Bye bye funding. Now, throw in the mix of making a "super-computer" that not only uses spare cycles of people around the globe, but also multitasks, people start listening again. And we get to do it while looking for ET and those mysterious gene sequences they installed in cave men. That's what this project is really about. It's bringing the masses together and uniting them in a way that finds solutions to the masses problems. Now you can say what you want about credit and contributions, I know. I get credit too and I leave my box on 24/7 so I'm definitely contributing what little I can. But to me, and many others who have spoken, it's not about that. It's about the unity and purpose. That's what underlies it all. So if all you want is numbers and certificates, that's fine and dandy. We'll make you some and you'll be set. But I ask, please change your mindset. And if that's not possible, please don't post it here. Be grudging in the background or leave quietly, but we all know the reasons. There are dozens of posts below this one. We could use a stop to it all. But remember, we want everybody here who has a cycle to spare, just because it's a cycle that we didn't have before.
Happy crunching and Happy Holidays.

I see you started Classic in May 1999. That's about 5 months earlier than I did. As of March 15, 2005 I had 10319 WUs. That's well over 2000+ more than you did. Nyah Nyah Nyah!

You don't EVEN want to start that argument. All my WUs were crunched back in the dark ages of SETI - before 3.04 or whatever it was that increased the crunch time just to reduce bandwidth usage.

At the time I was doing WUs in the 2:20 min range, which was in the top 5 to 10 avg WU times overall. I had the unix version running on brand new multi-proc PA-RISC HP9000s. I quit crunching Classic SETI when they artificially added more crunch time to the client.

I did start SETI-BOINC "back when", but I'll probably not continue that either, since it appears the project folks are still not hearing from the masses concerning credit. I was holding out hope that some of the SETI project folks would see the light when Classic ended, spend a little CPU time to eliminate the cheater scores from the database, and merge all the SETI-1 scores.

It's really a shame that the SETI-1 credits will never be cleaned up. Any claims to top team or individual positions are based on falsehoods, and only because UCB won't take the time or cycles to fix it.

---

To whom it may concern:

This argument over merging the Classic scores with the Boinc scores is useless. The decision was made years ago that the new system would have a different scoring system and the reason's are well known. That decision has been known throughout the Seti community for a year or more. The decision has been made and further debate will not change it. The new scoring system has been implemented but needs further refinement which will occur.

The decision could have also stated that Classic scores would NOT be carried over to Boinc/Seti but they didn't. I think that a decision like that could have been easily justified due to the massive cheating going on in Classic.

Nevertheless your Seti Classic scores are still part of your record here. The developers have gone to great lengths to make sure that happened. You can choose to advertise them in your signature here or not, whatever you wish. It is of your own conscience as to whether your classic scores have truly been earned and the score deserved. As for me, I do not advertise my Classic credit's as I consider the scores in Classic "tainted" and I do have a good deal of work at Classic.

Again, the decision has been made and it’s not going to change. Get over it!!

---

Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....

Geek@Play,

Well said.

A suggestion though to transfer credits, award 0.001 BOINC credits for each Classic credit if you signed on to BOINC after the 22 Nov 2005, with an exponentional increase for those who singed up earlier with about 1000 BOINC credits for each classic credit for those who took part in the BOINC testing ;-)

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Geek@Play,

Well said.

A suggestion though to transfer credits, award 0.001 BOINC credits for each Classic credit if you signed on to BOINC after the 22 Nov 2005, with an exponentional increase for those who singed up earlier with about 1000 BOINC credits for each classic credit for those who took part in the BOINC testing ;-)

Speaking as a BOINC beta tester... That would work! :P

Seriously, conversion of Classic credits to BOINC cs just isn't possible to do in a FAIR way... So, in my opinion, it shouldn't be done at all. There is no way anyone can say that those 100+ hour Classic v1 work units from back in 1999 should be worth the same as the 2 to 4 hour ones of late (which for the last month or so have gone into /dev/null anyway). Not to mention the 1 minute noisy quickies vs. VLAR hell. This was, in my opinion, THE main problem with the Classic score scheme. No differentiating between work units based on the effort (number of floating-point operations) your CPU needed to complete it.

The *current* BOINC scheme of (benchmark numbers)*CPU Time*scale factor is a step in the right direction, but it has problems as well. Namely that benchmark numbers vary considerably from OS to OS, even on the SAME machine, not to mention that they also vary significantly between different machines with (seemingly) the same specs. This is why I am happy to see BOINC moving in the direction of using a flop-count starting with the Beta SETI app. I hope it catches on at all the BOINC projects, and we can phase out the dastardly behaving "benchmarks". Of course, some projects might not use the FPU much, so there needs to be a way to allow for that... But I have faith that that will happen too.

---

https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

#Texit

Don't blame me, I voted for Johnson(L) in 2016.

Truth is dangerous... especially when it challenges those in power.

Time for an analogy again?

You bought a Ford truck in 1999 and drove it for 320,000 miles.
Now you are buying a new Ford truck. Do you want the Ford dealer to up your mileage to 320,000 so you can continue counting, or do you want the new car to start at the lowest possible mileage?

---

Time for an analogy again?

You bought a Ford truck in 1999 and drove it for 320,000 miles.
Now you are buying a new Ford truck. Do you want the Ford dealer to up your mileage to 320,000 so you can continue counting, or do you want the new car to start at the lowest possible mileage?

I'll take that one ....

I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

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I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

Angus,

For that to be workable, Berkeley would need to start the _enhanced SETI app. on a seperate project. A lot of people compete on "cross project" total BOINC credits. If Berkeley was to zero out the S@H/BOINC credit totals, that would anger a large number of people. For instance, S@H/BOINC is a little less than half of my cross-project total. Someone else might have done ALL their work on S@H/BOINC, and a third person might have done NO S@H/BOINC. If S@H/BOINC credits were zeroed out, some people would get screwed while others gain a LOT.

However, BOINC was designed to offer multiple types of work unit on the same project. This is one of the advantages for projects that use BOINC. Frankly, it would be silly in the extreme, not to mention cost-prohibitive, if S@H (or ANY other project) had to bring online a new array of servers/processes EVERY time they 'changed' the science app or the data format.

It is possible in the future that Berkeley may be offering SEVERAL different types of work units: Different 'scopes with different data formats, even MORE 'in-depth' analysis of various 'interesting areas', even totally different analysis methods (AstroPulse, for instance). All this can be run from ONE 'project'; the user requests work, and Berkeley sends a mix of whatever is available at the moment.

So, in short, zeroing out S@H/BOINC credit is NOT an option, nor is it a Good Thing!(tm).

Have a nice day.

---

https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

#Texit

Don't blame me, I voted for Johnson(L) in 2016.

Truth is dangerous... especially when it challenges those in power.

I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

Angus,

For that to be workable, Berkeley would need to start the _enhanced SETI app. on a seperate project. A lot of people compete on "cross project" total BOINC credits. If Berkeley was to zero out the S@H/BOINC credit totals, that would anger a large number of people. For instance, S@H/BOINC is a little less than half of my cross-project total. Someone else might have done ALL their work on S@H/BOINC, and a third person might have done NO S@H/BOINC. If S@H/BOINC credits were zeroed out, some people would get screwed while others gain a LOT.

However, BOINC was designed to offer multiple types of work unit on the same project. This is one of the advantages for projects that use BOINC. Frankly, it would be silly in the extreme, not to mention cost-prohibitive, if S@H (or ANY other project) had to bring online a new array of servers/processes EVERY time they 'changed' the science app or the data format.

It is possible in the future that Berkeley may be offering SEVERAL different types of work units: Different 'scopes with different data formats, even MORE 'in-depth' analysis of various 'interesting areas', even totally different analysis methods (AstroPulse, for instance). All this can be run from ONE 'project'; the user requests work, and Berkeley sends a mix of whatever is available at the moment.

So, in short, zeroing out S@H/BOINC credit is NOT an option, nor is it a Good Thing!(tm).

Have a nice day.

So the newly arrived Classic folks are screwed every which way. Nice job.

---

So the newly arrived Classic folks are screwed every which way. Nice job.

If you wish to see that way. As I see it, they are starting at zero just like I did. I just happen to join Boinc a year ago, as soon that became aware of its existence. The Classic credit is still reflected in the account page and therefore their contribution acknowledge. That was the past.

Most people were never interested enough to pay attention to the changes being made, should they really be on an equal footing?
Many people were only interested in bragging numbers and just ignored what was going on at Boinc. Should they be rewarded?
Many people came over to Boinc, then switched back "Because it was too much trouble". Should they be rewarded?

Some of the people here started when Boinc was in its infancy and had to suffer through the growing pains of multiple installs, lost credits, even for some total system reinstall to get Boinc to a point it is usable by the masses. Should their efforts not be reflected with a small head start in their credit?

---

Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

...For that to be workable, Berkeley would need to start the _enhanced SETI app. on a seperate project. A lot of people compete on "cross project" total BOINC credits. If Berkeley was to zero out the S@H/BOINC credit totals, that would anger a large number of people...

So, in short, zeroing out S@H/BOINC credit is NOT an option, nor is it a Good Thing!(tm).

So the newly arrived Classic folks are screwed every which way. Nice job.

I wouldn't use such negative terms for the credits...

Just look at it as though the new participants are joining a new better more fun game with new rules. So long as those rules (and credits) are equal for all, all stays 'fair'.

Paul (or someone) has put most of the past year or so of credits discussions into a very readable FAQ. Please check it out.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

So the newly arrived Classic folks are screwed every which way. Nice job.

Rubbish.
It was their choice to stay with Classic till the very end.
Hence those that made the switch early have more BOINC credits, they have more classic ones.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

They didn't start the Classic users numbers from zero when they came up with a new more intensive (and hence slower) science client so i see no reason to do so now.

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Grant
Darwin NT

So the newly arrived Classic folks are screwed every which way. Nice job.

No they're not. They start at the same place everyone else did - at zero.

Their Classic Credit is displayed in their profile (and can be displayed in their sig too depending on the site that generates their stats), so they lose NOTHING!

Matt's said his piece and I agree.

You've said your piece and been told it's impossible to convert Classic scores to Boinc credits in any way shape or form that's fair.

Get a life. I'm done with this discussion.

[PLONK]

I want to see SETI-II (advanced, or enhanced or whatever it's called) start over at 000,000

They didn't start the Classic users numbers from zero when they came up with a new more intensive (and hence slower) science client so i see no reason to do so now.

The workunits will take longer to process in the new client, therefore more credit will be awarded for them. The rate of credit earned should stay the same.

It is possible in the future that Berkeley may be offering SEVERAL different types of work units: Different 'scopes with different data formats, even MORE 'in-depth' analysis of various 'interesting areas', even totally different analysis methods (AstroPulse, for instance). All this can be run from ONE 'project'; the user requests work, and Berkeley sends a mix of whatever is available at the moment.

I assume that this will be controllable on a per computer ID bases with human usable settings that specify the types allowed and/or maximum expected processing time, and not through some global location setting related to allocations and reporting times which controls queue size which controls..... more things than most people can figure out.

Some computers may only be able to handle smaller and quickly processed WU because of user requirements, not for processor speed, memory or Berkeley defined requirements. While a computer with the same configuration and speed under the same account might be available for anything, no matter how long it takes.

The current reporting setting by location does not work when you have a wide mix of computers that come and go for different lengths of time. And when some of them have to be shut down on short notice, maybe never to return to BOINC.

Just as the current system has caused me to lose a lot of Credit, when after working on a WU for half a day I have to Abort out of it and shut the system down after Aborting everything in the queue also. Last night, because the servers were slow I wound up aborting a number of WU that had completed and were ready to upload, but it would not take them yet and keep backing of. After wasting an hour trying to get the servers to take them, and stop downloading more WU all the while at the same time, I just had to shut it down and format the drive.