TEAMRACE is OVER!!!

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

Thanks to all for a hard fought race.

Nice job everyone.

Good race everybody. It was fun!

Good work!

Congrats to everybody

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!!!

My only question now is...


What am I going to look forward to tomorrow?

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

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

JigPu

WOW!!! 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

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

Hey good job everyone!!!

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

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

Cy

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

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.

Must Agree

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

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.

Agree in Priciple

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

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... Anyways...

-Tyrinon

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.