Rosetta: Tale of Scoundrel Part 2

[Adak]

I'm a skeptical guy; you point to something odd looking in the sky, and I don't think it's a flying saucer. You point to a picture of a "Bigfoot", and I think it's a guy in a gorilla suit, right off.

Last year, we had a "King's Gauntlet" race in our SETI team. So the race starts up, and we're doing fine, surging ahead of the other 5 teams, since we had a lot of help from the FAH team.

Imagine our surprise when ONE guy on another team (one of the smallest teams), turned in *and got credit for* well over a *million* credits, in just a few days!

Say what??

If you're familiar with SETI, you know that the points/credits are *not* given, until the WU has been verified by another cruncher - and that takes time. There is *no way* in hell that you can get 1,000,000 credits worth of work verified that fast.

But what if all that work, has already been verified?

Because he transferred these credits in from another team. Say another team where he became the founder, and was able to "collect" (aka legally steal), these points. All those points are already verified.

So on the one hand, he could have crunched SETI all year to get those credits, and then transferred himself to the small team in question, OR he could have spent 5 minutes making a founder's request, waited two months for the grace period to expire, and then easily transferred the credits/points, into the small team in the race.

If you look at his info in BOINC, his computers are naturally "hidden". When he's asked how he did it, he says "In the Irish way" (it was an Irish team he was on).

Uh-huh! Is that right?

When the race was going on, it was my first time running SETI, and I naturally thought all this was above board. That this wunderkid had indeed cached a lot of work away, in advance, just waiting for the race to start, and then dumped it (sent it in for credit).

Now I know differently.

You can't have a fair race (I don't mean perfectly fair, I mean just a sporting chance), in a BOINC project. It's too rewarding and easy, to cheat.

(Despite this, The Pirate Fleet Team we're racing with in Rosetta, has clearly *not* been cheating, at all.)

For a more competitive race, the cheating will be irresistible, and easily done, with BOINC. That definitely includes the "King's Gauntlet" race, held each year in November.


*Not First Knight, he was crunching away.

 

[benbaked]

Yeah that was pretty crazy how they suddenly jumped out of nowhere and beat us at the end, back when the Gauntlet finished I seem to recall people saying the way they were able to beat us was by combining the "Paddys in Ireland" and "Ireland" teams. We put up a good fight last year with the help of the folding team, I hope this year's Gauntlet is as fun.

 

[Adak]

Yeah that was pretty crazy how they suddenly jumped out of nowhere and beat us at the end, back when the Gauntlet finished I seem to recall people saying the way they were able to beat us was by combining the "Paddys in Ireland" and "Ireland" teams. We put up a good fight last year with the help of the folding team, I hope this year's Gauntlet is as fun.

Well, First Knight was simply a spectacular cruncher - obviously a world class network when he's able to outrun our combined FAH & SETI team (well, a good portion of it, anyway), all by himself.

The guy that makes me cringe (and I pretty much ignored it at the time), was the guy who just joined the Irish team (can't remember which one now), and got over a million points donated to the team he'd joined.

Because you can't *GET* a million credits worth of work cached away, and you can't get that amount of work verified that fast, even if you could cache it all away. Just ask First Knight, he was weeks getting all his work verified.

It was not the combining of the two teams that beat us - we whooped them badly. It was just First Knight, a phenomenal cruncher, and the administrative cheater who had 1,000,000+ credits transferred over to one of the Irish teams, "in the Irish way".

It was a great race.

You know Ben, we could have made it a *LOT* closer if we could have both got our Linux boxes up and crunching, quickly. Remember that? We would have kept the lead for another day (but still lost in the last hours), according to my rough figures for it.

If the teams are going to allow dumping, then it's no fun for me. They're not new credits, just administrative (automatic) transfers, and can be used to wreck the whole concept of a race.

Now that the trick is known, anyone could administratively dump millions of credits onto any team in the race. That's just cheating and wrecks the whole concept of a sporting race. I don't give a damn how Irish you are.

 

[donuts]

I think First Knights' power helped "mask" the transfer, (not that he did it intentionally but if there a 5 alarm blaze, whose going to notice the campfire) I do remember hearing about the combining of the 2 teams, but missed the transfer of the points. Course I just remembered that I hadn't been on the SETI team very long before the gauntlet.

I would have helped on the Linux, but the only experience I have is using Ubuntu when Stanford first came out with the SMP client for folding.

 

[Adak]

Definitely true! If he hadn't boasted and shown us a graph from his stats, about donating the 1,000,000+ points, I wouldn't have even known.

Well, the Linux problem was Ben & my fault, as well. Both of us swapped our Window rigs over to the race, thinking that would be plenty of power. Neither of us knew how to run BOINC on Linux with an optimized SETI app, anyway.

Halfway through the race, we both said "gotta get those linux boxes (which were Ubuntu), over to the SETI race". And we couldn't get any help on that from the forum.

Took us 2 or 3 days to get it figured out, and switched over.

It would have made the race much closer if we had switched them over at the start - but I don't believe we would have won. I believe the guy that did the administrative transfer of a million+ points, would simply have made it 2 million.

That's the thing - if you allow point transfers like this into these races, you may as well not have them. Teams that have no cheaters will simply never win.

Edit: First Knight now is inactive, but part of SETI, USA,with 127 hosts, and 935 computers. He lists his nationality as "Ireland", and has just over 3 million points, only. His big push in SETI was only during the Kings Gauntlet race.

 

[tricknasty]

Edit: First Knight now is inactive, but part of SETI, USA,with 127 hosts, and 935 computers. He lists his nationality as "Ireland", and has just over 3 million points, only. His big push in SETI was only during the Kings Gauntlet race.

wow such a waste of all that power to crunch for the gauntlet only. but maybe he normally folds or something?

I definitely think race organizers should ban credit transfers, im sure they will