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Chimp Challenge 2014 update

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the_cultie

Member
Joined
Feb 3, 2005
I regret to inform you that I come bearing bad news. At best, it looks like Chimp Challenge has been postponed; at worst, it won't be happening this year.

With the passing of Adak a huge driving force behind the challenge was lost. Also it seemed to be hard to get other teams involved in the planning process, which was very difficult when trying to get large teams and small teams playing on a level playing field.

If it does happen this year I suspect that the challenge will take place some time in Autumn when the weather cools down a bit and everyone can run at full capacity.

I would love some opinions or ideas on how we might be able to breath new life into Chimp Challenge and make as fun as it used to be.
 
Here's one thought. give it a miss this year - spend the year debating potential new formats, handicaps etc or look to keep the old ones. BA is ending in January 15 so the playing field should be more even - who knows, you may be able to go back to a simple points race.

In the meantime I shall be stocking up on poo ready to fling when the challenge returns
 
Was thinking that too. So is big adv stopping completely? Will it be replaced by something else or is the time of quad cpu folding machines coming to an end?
 
I agree with Nathan_P. everyone put some thought into it and come up with ideas that everyone can agree upon. may even be a time for a name change also.
 
Was thinking that too. So is big adv stopping completely? Will it be replaced by something else or is the time of quad cpu folding machines coming to an end?

They will still fold regular SMP and do ok at it. PG said they are going to adjust the QRB SMP formula. So we will see.

I have ab Idea for the CC. Make it smaller teams of 25 or 50 folders and you have to sign up for the team.

Every huge team can have several small teams.
Overclockers team 1
Overclockers team 2
or names like Overclocker Monkeys, Overclocker Tigers and so on.
Evga East or Evga West maybe even get a couple dozen from H to make up a team.
Then maybe there will be 10 - 15 teams folding from different forums.

People from small forums can join any team they like or merge together to form a team.
I think by keeping the numbers low on a team may get more interest if you want to do just a full out point race.
It may even spur some competition among the huge teams.
 
Since you would not want the top producers from one team all together, teams like EVGA and H where the tops 20 all produce over 400,000PPD the teammates should be randomly chosen.
The top ten on H can beat the top 20 combined on smaller teams so it would have to be a random selection of folders who want do this.
 
oh, this news sucks, but that's the way it goes sometimes.
I enjoyed it last year and i hope you can put something together.
 
I think we should start from the other end and figure out the why before the how.

What is the actual purpose of the challenge? Is it to get new members, to encourage existing members, to promote competition or just for fun? [in the beginning it was a race for pride among a few people]

Is the challenge meant to focus on all teams, some teams, some subset of a team (like the top producers or the bottom guys)? [in the beginning it was just a subset of 2 teams]

Are we trying to get new machines into folding or is it really just for some fun for us? [in the beginning it was just for fun, it wasn't used for recruiting]

It seems we have been trying to have every goal rolled into one challenge - perhaps that's not possible. We need to understand why big teams dislike the CC so much. Perhaps partly its because we tried to have a competition that has too many goals. We have taken a small, personal race for honor, and turned it into something quite different. Big teams naturally want as a goal, the team with the most power and points. Small teams see they can't compete on that level so they want something else. Rather like a guy bring a canon to target shooting. If he blows away the target, what's the point of anyone else shooting?

Maybe instead of focusing on competition we should focus on something else like cooperation. Perhaps something like a huge foldathon where we all try to work together to break the total points for all teams in a week. Competition is good but it can also cause a lot of unhappy feelings. Sometimes cooperation is more productive in the long run. Alternatively are there things we can compete on other than points? eg: number of machines folding, number of new members?

Given the purpose we can then decided how to achieve the goal. That might mean ignoring certain teams or targeting parts of teams.

We need a name. It seems the old name has a lot of character but has also built up a lot of resistance. Some of the negative will go away with time if we don't have a challenge for a few years. But there is the risk of igniting old flames using the old name. Perhaps we need a new name with a new goal. Or we stick with teams that support the CC and only work within that framework.
 
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Well I was starting to wonder about this too...

Last year was my 1st real CC and was a Great ride going all out with everyone else ^^


It seemed to me it got a lot of things right, for example it seemed very popular that people continued folding for their own "home" teams under their own names and did not have to swap around for example.

While I loved that we won again, it certainly was no easy victory and really felt like we all put so much into the Chimp Challenge, actually looked like we would not win for some time there!
- although some perhaps find some sort of balancing annoying, it does allow different sized teams to compete. Though I can understand making it work and be totally fair is not easy to accomplish. But we gotta try right :)

I personally feel that Competition is a key part of it, folks love to get behind a real challenge like a race. Without this aspect and if it was "just" an annual foldathon it would not garner quite the same enthusiasm from as many people...


The Chimp Challenge last year certainly pulled extra new people into each team helping out that normally do not fold and perhaps should also be kept up as a way of generating new awareness of folding@home as the call goes out to each teams forums for help for the race.
- this particularly worked well as the new folders 1st up were up for helping out their internet hangout buddies in the CC, so seems important to keep it a main team thing if possible.
- Quite a few of those new people commented that they did not know about folding@home until the call for help went out to their respective forums

Perhaps you guys are right and leaving it this year could be a good move, certainly until after the summer now, which also gives us time to put something together which won't feel rushed.
- (I was still looking forward to it and almost have a 2nd system built just for it!)

Whatever happens it must not fizzle out and get forgotten, rather be used as a springboard to propel it, in whatever form, to new heights!
 
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I've been thinking along lines similar to Orion and Humanoid, that bringing new folders into the stable is, long term, more challenging and rewarding than simply the power struggle that has been the overly played theme the few years I've been involved.


Perhaps used as a long term recruiting challenge? Simply a team's total percentage growth of folders from X-time vs. Y-time. Example: if OCF has 100 folders as of April 1st, and by May 20th has 105 folders = 5% growth, whereas during the same period the [H] has 1000 folders growing to 1055, then the [H] would 'win' with 5.5% growth. Stretch goal -> but if by June 20th OCF has 104 folders and the [H] has 1025 folders, OCF wins the stretch goal with 4% growth vs. [H]'s 2.5% growth.


To me, the objective is to get more people and their PCs involved for the long run. Pande can and will change how their software behaves with hardware and no one in the Folding community, us daily drivers, has any say so in that. But in the long term, as hardware evolves and the software is re-written to take advantage of it, having new blood bringing in new hardware will make an impact. Although we continue to upgrade, we'll never do it fast enough to keep up as with having new folders adding their shiny new rigs at an increasing pace would have.
 
The Chimp Challenge last year certainly pulled extra new people into each team helping out that normally do not fold and perhaps should also be kept up as a way of generating new awareness of folding@home as the call goes out to each teams forums for help for the race.

Interestingly, the 2011 CC was in May and there was a slight points increase in that month but a huge fall off the following 7 months.
The 2012 folding numbers were flat from January to June with a slight drop in total points for the May CC.

While our numbers went up slightly in 2013 during the folding contest, they immediately returned to their lower February values in May. No real change is apparent having to do with the CC in any year. 2013 CC was in April.

Perhaps the CC is not a good recruiting tool or else it causes as many people to quit as we gain for a net result of zero. It's also possible that fluctuations in monthly points is far greater than the CC effect.

At any rate, it appears the CC is not producing a very pronounced or long lasting points effect. Maybe this means we should be concentrating on the fun aspect of the CC rather than trying to draw in new members directly.
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for me it was competeing with other people with rigs like mine and do something positive with a device that for the most part is a toy. sure the guys running server rigs ran away from me but knowing what the two other guys were running made me work at it a little harder and held my interest.
 
Sorry haven't replied sooner, being sick last week made it hard to concentrate on anything.

Anyway, all good points made here and I agree with orion, we need to get the fun back into Chimp challenge. Recruiting should be a separate event.

As far as I remember Chimp Challenge started out just between us and Maximum PC team, older members with better memory please correct me if I'm wrong, and it was pure fun and team pride. It's become a bit to serious for some people so its time for a relaunch. How we make it fun again is the big question.
 
I think that in order to bring back the fun, the event has to go back to being simple. Two teams that just want to smack talk is all it takes. Using the KISS principal (Keep It Simple Stupid) takes the anxiety out and lets the fun creep in.

If its fun, others will join. Let each team bring in as many points as they can. Period.

If smaller teams don't feel that they can compete, they can join other small teams to push forward. That's where the fun is. Talking to other teams to build a coalition for the greater good.

Wasn't the original two teams selected because like minded sub-teams with "chimps" in their names wanted to compete? Lets bring that idea back in. The only rule is the most points under one team name.
 
Exactly KISS :p

Couldn't resist :rofl:

Wasn't the original two teams selected because like minded sub-teams with "chimps" in their names wanted to compete?

It used to be that way during the challenge we'd all fold under the one name, we were T32Monkeys. But it meant people had to change user name and it was hard to get everyone to do it, also it was a pain for people with multiple machines in multiple locations.

Maybe we could have multiple teams enter and we pair off against like sized teams in a straight points race so that we don't have to worry about handicaps etc. For example, us against Custom PC & bit-tech, [H]ardOCP against Hardware.no. Folding@evga has such high production at least 2 teams would have to form a coalition to make the race fair but it would keep things simple.

Goals could be calculated based on average production too. First team to the goal wins, and to determine an overall winner, the very first team to their respective goal is the over all winner, would mean everyone has a fair chance. It could be viewed as a handicapped system but might be a simpler implementation. Well in my brain it is :chair:
 
Was thinking that too. So is big adv stopping completely? Will it be replaced by something else or is the time of quad cpu folding machines coming to an end?

BA in its current form is stopping completely. At this point nothing is going to replace it.

What you do with your existing rigs is a personal choice. quad CPU should still pump out 200-400k PPD depending on project, not a lot by today's standards but everyone will be earning less points so they will still be king. What will change is PPD/W - brings them more in line with GPU folding.

Personally I will keep my 3 2p machines folding - upgrades won't happen as often but I will still be folding and flinging poo as and when needed.

As for chimp challenge - back to a simple points race, 1st chimp to the finish wins. Here is the tricky bit, not everyone will want to join the race for various reasons, people who do change must respect the decision of everyone who doesn't - otherwise you will end up with a [H] style disaster on your hands
 
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