[Cy]

Just a heads up on new ways to cheat at SETI. :/

Linked from ArsTechnica

Cy

[RED Hot Machine]

I never understood why people cheat.

Atleast we know what we aren't going to be doing .

[Yodums]

Yay, now I know what Benz has been up to. He's using option #2 hehe.

Yodums

[[Oc]acaridans]

I always figured it would have been that easy..

Just imagine what would happen if berkley removed credits for duplicate WU's.

[Yodums]

I was wondering.... About option 2. How did benz get like 300-400 a day, when you have to crunch 99% of it first?!

Yodums

[{PMS}fishy]

Originally posted by Yodums
I was wondering.... About option 2. How did benz get like 300-400 a day, when you have to crunch 99% of it first?!

Yodums

Some one else would do the first part of the WU and distribute it to hunders of other users.

[lonewolf1983]

very interesting
no idea what would drive people to cheat

the interesting fact for mine is that option 2 isnt really cheating, since all the work is being done, its just like many people crunching under one account isnt it? or am i missing something?
as for option 1, i dont really understand it

as for Benz, the main thing that we think is screwy is his average times, which neither of these methods can provide

food for thought....

[KenCo]

Yes, it's really too bad about cheaters.

The good news for us is; if and when they close those loopholes and cancel the accounts of cheaters, we are likely to gain position against many teams. Benz is the only one who appears to be cheating (not saying he is for sure without proof though), it seems likely he would be our only loss.

[Cy]

I've always felt cheating is just completely useless. If you want a shortcut why even cheat...just tell people how great you are at something and save even more time by not even doing it at all!

Cy

[aggies92]

How cheaters derive their personal satisfaction has always been a mystery to me. I would expect to see this in gaming more than here, but I guess the motivations are the same.

I wonder if SETI even cares. I mean, as long as the WU gets crunched and returned, they got what they want. All the rest is just icing to get people like us to do what we do. Interesting...

[ss69nova]

What it comes down to is 1) the SETI project is not moving along as fast as it looks. 2) the only peolpe getting hurt by those cheating are the teams themselfs.

It will be intersting to see what barkely does about this.

[taloah]

I just don't understand why people would cheat. Especially when they are cheating in something that is for the good of mankind. What do they gain from it? No one is going to give them money for crunching more WUs. The only thing you get is a since of accomplishment for helping. I hope all of the people involved in cheating get there accounts deleted. I do not think to our team will be effected my this, and if it is it will only be a small handful of people. I would rather our team lose units than have cheaters in it.

[Wolverez]

I just hope the heck, that Berkeley throws the bums out, fixes the problem and let's the rest of us crunch on.

As they say, it just takes a few bad apples to make the whole barrel look bad.

[SkyHook]

aggies92 , brings up an interesting point. It has long been my personal view that SETI @ Home would be perfectly happy if the whole user statistics thing could disappear. It's only value to the project is as a marketing tool to entice people to get involved. Now don't get me wrong, I am no happier about this kind of "cheating" than any other, and in the context of the SETI project I don't understand the motivation for cheating, but the reality of the situation is that the methods being discussed at present don't compromise the integrity of the data and therefore SETI is in fact getting accomplished what they what in a manner of speaking. Now a "hacked" client which generates incorrect data or "dumbie" results being returned do impact the actual credibility of the scientific data and cast a negative light on the project, and in the past SETI has pounced on these problems rather quickly. The two schemes put forth now in someways can be viewed as nothing more than what Berkley does itself. We all know that Berkley routinely redistributes WUs that have already been crunched for verifacation purposes, so Berkley is not baffled on how to handle repeated instances of the same WU, therefore the data is not corrupted. With the amount of work that the staff at SETI @ Home has piled in front of them I just wonder if this kind of CHEATING is really going to be a high priority.

It kind of boils down to:
Is it cheating and therefore wrong - ABSOLUTELY
Does it bother me - ABSOLUTELY
Is it a TOP LEVEL problem for Berkley right now - POSSIBLY NOT

Just the view of the Village Idiot

SkyHook

[jokrswild]

Yeah, i dont' understand why you would cheat.. People cheat at school to get good grades so they go further, but seti offers no immediate benefits, especially if you're cheating.

The only cheating i do, is making the processor go faster than it's supposed to.. :-)

[TC]

People will always try to cheat if there's a way to cheat at something. I hope Berkeley gets on top of this and wipes out some accounts.

[KenCo]

Well, I do think the stats are quite important. I think most of us feel and enjoy the competitive atmosphere. It's fun to compete.
I think without the stats SETI@home wouldn't have even half the processing power that is has, probably nowhere near half.

It's true that this type of cheating may not compromise the integrity of the results, but it does tend to diminish the enjoyment of the competition. Why should I spend another couple thousand dollars upgrading my farm to make myself more competitive when the cheaters will stay ahead of me no-matter what I do.

Of course I'm in it for the science far more than for the competition. But my point is, without the competition there would be many many fewer computers crunching SETI, and that would significantly slow down the science.

[jazztrumpet216]

People have cheated before. People will cheat again. As soon as Berkeley figures out a way to stop one batch of cheaters, another way will emerge. Cheating sucks, end of story.

As far as Benz cheating, we can't prove that. He's never responded to e-mails from TC and Berkeley hasn't gotten back to us about his account. We don't know what he's up to but until we do, there isn't much we can or should do about it.

[rogerdugans]

The people who do this are sad, IMO, and I do feel sorry for them.

It does not change how I feel about the Seti@Home project in the least, nor will it impact my participation in any way: bottom line is I was crunching before I ended up at OC.Com and joined the OC Seti Team, and I'll continue as long as there is a project- stats or no!

But the stats HAVE added to the participation without a doubt!
Its too bad that some people feel such a need to be ahead that they will sell the project, and teammates/competitors short by cheating.

And even if the results turned in are valid- just far too many, etc, they ARE still a drain on the project! We have all felt the impact of low bandwidth at Berkeley, and they do have limited equipment and resources.
This kind of thing wastes them horribly.

[Yodums]

If people want to cheat so bad, they can go make their own league and see who beats who by 0.000001 of a second. They aren't doing SETI for the idea of SETI .. . mine as well leave.