TEAMRACE is OVER!!!

[SkyHook]

These past 7 week 38 of our members have been engaged in a no-holds-barred Grand Finale TeamRace to mark the rapidly approaching end of SETI @ Home Phase I.

The WINNERS were The Froggies, followed by The Sharkies, nest was Carl's Crew and finally The Crunch'o'matics. Representing all Teams was Norrko who had to withdraw early but still added greatly to the Totals.

Speaking of the Totals, one figure I would like to point out is that these 38 members over the past 49 days crunched a pretty substantial 85,287 WUs. That's some serious crunching.

CONGRATULATIONS to all of the racers!

Respectfully,
SkyHook

[eaglescouter]

:clap: :clap: :clap: Thanks to all for a hard fought race.

[TC]

Nice job everyone.

[craigiz1]

Good race everybody. It was fun!

Good work! :D

[racecar12]

Congrats to everybody:cool:

[LandShark]

it's really a good race and really great production increase over the past weeks!! i remember we were start with ave. wu/day of 300wu or so, and now, we all ave. 400+/day!!

great work everyone!!! :cool:

[cooldrum3]

My only question now is...


What am I going to look forward to tomorrow?

I think we need to start another one...lol!

[JigPu]

Great job everybody! Great race, and I hope to see more of them in SETI2 hopefully :)

JigPu

[Tyrinon]

WOW!!! :eek: That's some serious computing power for 85k+ wu. I don't think I'd like the power bill for all those computers. ;)
Congrats guys.

-Tyrinon

[Eroc]

Excellent job everyone! It has been fun! I even have a new cruncher in my sig because of it ;)

[Cuper]

Hey good job everyone!!! :)

[Dk Jedi Allianc]

It was fun while it lasted. Now bring on Seti II.

[Cy]

Congratulations to the Winners! Team Crunch'O'Matics, thanks for all your hard work, we'll get them next time! :)

Cy

[Morpheus]

THANKS!! That race was a lot of fun...

I hope we all can do it again with BOINC & Seti II

Special thanks to Skyhook for your never-tiring efforts... and eaglescouter too :clap: :D :clap:

[TC]

There's not going to be any way to have a race in Boinc from the looks of their crediting system so far - it's a real mess imo.

[SkyHook]

Unfortunately, after reading every scrap of info I can find concerning the credits award system for the BOINC platform, it appears that at least until some folks with a LOT MORE BRAINS than I have come up with something it is going to be very difficult if not impossible to have TeamRaces or for that matter even Daily Stats.

For those who haven't followed the development and beta testing of the BOINC platform with the use of the AstroPulse client here's some of the current lowdown. First and probably the biggest killer to the way that we are accustomed to having things is the fact that simply returning completed work gets you NOTHING. Now you complete a WU, return it, and your WU count goes up by one. In the new system you complete work, return it, and it sets there until at least two other people return the same work with a nearly identical results. It is projected that this could take upto 14 days before you receive and credit award, and that award is not some nice straightforward something like 1 for each work unit return and verified as acceptable. Instead what you get awarded varies from workunit to workunit based on the performance of your machine and the performance of the other people who also did this work. So if you have a real high performance system but the others have PII's and PIII's, your award is going to be less than if all three had similar system. It has also be stated that under some circumstances you may actually do and return satisfactory but not receive any credit for it for anyone of a number of reasons.

I'm not saying any of this to discourage anybody, on the contrary, I'm simply saying that we're going to have to wait and see what happens once this thing gets wheeled out the door and we get our hands on it to see what is and isn't going to be possible and how quickly third-party stuff comes available to enhance the experience. Just don't expect to go from Old SETI to SETI on BOINC and not run into an awful lot of changes in the way we were used to doing things.

Respectfully,
SkyHook

[cooldrum3]

That idea kinda sucks, not because I think the credit idea itself is bad...but because of the having to wait, and not getting rewards for having a fast system, and the fact that you may not get credit at all. I think they need to base the credit not on what other people may do with a slower computer, but instead on how much info is actually returned from that unit (ie:spikes, guassians, pulses, and triplets). It seems to me that this would be a fairly good indicator of how much "credit" a WU should be worth.

As far as the teamrace question, I think it would still be possible, but we'd have to run it for like a 3 month minimum in order to get some good results. The law of averages dictates that, in the end, everyone should receive the same amount and type of WU's to crunch. It couldn't hurt to try it out just once, and if it doesn't work, then we just won't do it again...but I think you'll find out that I'm right and that we'll have a very close race again.

[SkyHook]

I understand what you are saying about Races and such but the simple truth is we are currently blessed with a number of utilities that have had 4 years to mature and be accepted for dealing with the Stats of Phase I. Now we are going to be back at square one as none of the stuff we have grown dependant on has even a remote chance of working with the BOINC platform and the new awards system.

This means SETIQueue, SETISpy, SETIDriver, etc., are all going to be useless in the beginning. When SETIatHome first started there was none of those things available, but nobody had experience Distributed Computing either, so the users and the niffty add-on's grew together. Now you have a very large number of people who are used to having all the nice information and fun races and stuff who are going to have to return to running SETI just for the sake of running SETI.

SkyHook

[Tyrinon]

I don't care much for the new point system for Seti from reading about it in the earlier post, and for the same reason as others. :(

I guess that we will have to wait and see... :rolleyes: Anyways...

-Tyrinon

[rugbyroy]

I don't think their point system is very good. People in general are competitive. They want to win. It's like driving a nascar race on marbles. Looks like you should go somewhere but you're not movin. No fun in that. Personally I like the competition SETI brings, and I'm guessing a lot of others do, hence all the statistics. I reckon that if the boinc seti doesn't seem like much of a "race" then a lot of people are gonna drop it and fold or something.

[Morpheus]

personally, the "cobblestone" system makes sense to me.. the rest of it seems like a load of crap (to put it bluntly)...

I think the only redeeming part of this is that Folding is headed that way too (to BOINC)... I guess I will crunch until SETI 1 finishes and see what they come up with next...

I do like the fact that they will transfer/register everyone one on the team automatically. I just hope it works...

I also think that now that we've had some many cool third party apps, they will be soon to follow the introduction of BOINC--and I bet they will work for SETI, Folding, Prime... whatever goes BOINC...

To be honest my interest in computers has been waning over the last couple years--time is short anyway for the hobby as I see it... Not that I'm going to disappear or anything: but I am beginning (already) to get ready to move to Europe in 2005...

It does feel like the end of an era for me--so many hobbies, so little time... :D

Crunch on!!

[LandShark]

honestly, the main thing I'm worry about and wishing is we all will still stay together as a Team and could get good use of our ever growing crunching power....

I can see we'll lost some members due to the change (which after reading those, I'm not sure about myself either..), and don't know if it's really worth to spending all those $$ for farming and having the fastest machine just for crunching SETI anymore (due to the new credit system...)

however, it's still only our very early guess... let's all wait and see. ;)

Once an Overclocker, Always an Overclocker! ;)

[katelin]

Congratz Froggies! What's green and red all over? Frogs in a blender, haha. Sick, I know.

It was a fun race. It seems to motivate people to put out an extra effort, push their crunchers a little hotter, squeeze an extra ounce out their daily production. Overall, it's good for the team. Congrats to all.

[eaglescouter]

If Seti/Boinc fails to provide daily statistics, I can honestly say that much of my interest in the project will be lost.

Why I crunch seti and for this team:

1. It's interesting science.
2. I get to participate in fellowship with this team and its members.
3. I can gauge my efforts/progress through daily (well...to be honest it's more like hourly) statistics.
4. I can set goals to increase production based on the statistics and attempt to catch/pass my teammates.

While items one and two are nice, I think I would turn off the crunchers if items three and four were unavailable.

Someone needs to talk to the folks designing seti/boinc and show them this truth. No stats, no crunchers.

And to give me fewer points for crunching with a 3.2Ghz P4 and give a P1 more points for the same work unit? This makes me very unhappy. I would actually be penalized in the points field for investing more of my money in donated computer power? No Way, No How, it's Not Acceptable.

If they want to fix the system, make a points system based on how many hours it takes a (insert a computer system of your choice here) to complete a unit. Then assign one point per hour. This allows every type of PC to get points for work done, and allows folding, seti, weather, and prime to all be on the same points scale. Points to be credited when the WU is completed.

Failure to fix this defficincy will result in a significant loss of donated computing power.

[LandShark]

Originally posted by eaglescouter

Someone needs to talk to the folks designing seti/boinc and show them this truth. No stats, no crunchers.

it's might not be what science really is, but it's pretty much truth, right?! how many people do you think out of the 4+ millions SETI user that keep on crunch isn't b/c of the stats?! it could very much be less than 1% or worst, 0.01%!?

do you all think we could try to "raise our voice/concern" to Berkeley so at least they understand what they are doing/will do......:rolleyes:

[SkyHook]

This is the BOINC/AstroPulse messageboards:

http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/ap/forum/

If you read through some of the posts there you will see that there is already a fair amount of dissatisfaction being expressed about the way things seem to be headed.

My take on all this(which maybe way off base) is that Berkeley got terribly concerned about the "cheating" that was present with the old system, and don't get me wrong, there was "cheating" taking place but they took a "flea" sized problem and applied a "steamroller" cure. Given some time some of these morons that feel beating the system is cool will introduce just as many cheats to this plan, but how will any of us average crunchers be able to spot them? Under the current system some people have gotten extremely good at spotting questionable results and bringing them to everyone's attention. With the new awards system numbers will be jumping all over the place and make figuring out what might be questionable even more difficult. Berkeley says, "don't worry, we'll now be able to stay right on top of things", well past history indicates that it is not wise to hold one's breath waiting on Berkeley for this type of policing. Our very own team waited almost a year to have Berkeley deal with a member who was very much an obvious scammer.

As others have said, right now this is very much an assumption game right now, but as the posts mentioned above pointout, we are not the only one's seeing potential problems coming up.

Respectfully,
SkyHook

[rugbyroy]

Maybe we should all email them. Alone we are weak, but together we are powerful..