i like the new credit system and think it is quite fair --- it awards credit based on actual work done, not potential to do work.

Mod.T

In that link a David Baker broke current mod law by using the "C" word can you delete it ?

I don't recall seeing that the new rules were retroactive. LOL

Nobody said they weren't, either. Posts that don't meet current forum standards and are still visible to the public should be hidden, ragardless of when they were posted.

If that causes an issue, then perhaps the standards need to be re-evaluated.

<giggle, chuckle, hehe>
I thought Backdating had been ruled "out of the question".
Oops... I said the "B" word.
LOL

TSK TSK TSK

Dear Lord people : Tony, Carl and I are sharing a humorous (albeit a tad off-topic) moment. There is no need to minus any one of us ... at least in this exhange. Have you read some other threads, you would have noticd that We ( as in Tony, Carl and I have discovered there are a lot of things that unite us and that we can disagree with a modicum of civility: allow us to rejoice in that. :) )

Mod.T

In that link a David Baker broke current mod law by using the "C" word can you delete it ?

I don't recall seeing that the new rules were retroactive. LOL

Nobody said they weren't, either. Posts that don't meet current forum standards and are still visible to the public should be hidden, ragardless of when they were posted.

If that causes an issue, then perhaps the standards need to be re-evaluated.

<giggle, chuckle, hehe>
I thought Backdating had been ruled "out of the question".
Oops... I said the "B" word.
LOL

TSK TSK TSK

Dear Lord people : Tony, Carl and I are sharing a humorous (albeit a tad off-topic) moment. There is no need to minus any one of us ... at least in this exhange. Have you read some other threads, you would have noticd that We ( as in Tony, Carl and I have discovered there are a lot of things that unite us and that we can disagree with a modicum of civility: allow us to rejoice in that. :) )

It is nice to see some good honest humour here :-D

---

Team mauisun.org

I think the new credit system is a huge improvement. It's not perfect, but then again, nothing is. It's minimised the effect of optimised BOINC clients, which were overstating credit by 3x - 4x what it should have been. The reason it was overstated so much is that there was no corresponding optimised science application.

So the new system is a step forward. It gives credit based on how much work you do - you do four times as many structures as me and you get four times as much credit as me.

There is one remaining problem however. It's now 3x - 4x more difficult to catch other teams and users. I reckon it's going to take 2.5, perhaps 3 years before the effects of the optimised clients have become irrelevant. That's why I was in favour of a backdating (it's not a banned word is it?) which would have mostly fixed things, or freezing the stats and starting from scratch again, alá D2OL.

Let me be really clear on this - I'm not saying there was cheating. What I'm saying is that the first 9 months worth of credits were basically multiplied by 3x what they really should have been. If there was a backdating then XS would still have approx 50% more credit than Free DC and the DPC and three times that of Anandtech. But people would be catchable again.

It's like a South American country that's had hyper-inflation, but the currency has been revalued so that money is sane again. Except prices have stayed the same, so it takes longer to save up for that 50" widescreen TV.

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I think the new credit system is a huge improvement. It's not perfect, but then again, nothing is. It's minimised the effect of optimised BOINC clients, which were overstating credit by 3x - 4x what it should have been. The reason it was overstated so much is that there was no corresponding optimised science application.

So the new system is a step forward. It gives credit based on how much work you do - you do four times as many structures as me and you get four times as much credit as me.

There is one remaining problem however. It's now 3x - 4x more difficult to catch other teams and users. I reckon it's going to take 2.5, perhaps 3 years before the effects of the optimised clients have become irrelevant. That's why I was in favour of a backdating (it's not a banned word is it?) which would have mostly fixed things, or freezing the stats and starting from scratch again, alá D2OL.

Let me be really clear on this - I'm not saying there was cheating. What I'm saying is that the first 9 months worth of credits were basically multiplied by 3x what they really should have been. If there was a backdating then XS would still have approx 50% more credit than Free DC and the DPC and three times that of Anandtech. But people would be catchable again.

It's like a South American country that's had hyper-inflation, but the currency has been revalued so that money is sane again. Except prices have stayed the same, so it takes longer to save up for that 50" widescreen TV.

This is part of the humor, right?

---

Nemesis n. A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

I was actually trying to get back to a serious discussion.

If you have a contention with it, let's hear it.

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I was actually trying to get back to a serious discussion.

If you have a contention with it, let's hear it.

You're seriously trying to start a discussion on backdating again?

This can only be considered humorous.

---

Nemesis n. A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

I think the new credit system is a huge improvement. It's not perfect, but then again, nothing is. It's minimised the effect of optimised BOINC clients, which were overstating credit by 3x - 4x what it should have been. The reason it was overstated so much is that there was no corresponding optimised science application.

So the new system is a step forward. It gives credit based on how much work you do - you do four times as many structures as me and you get four times as much credit as me.

There is one remaining problem however. It's now 3x - 4x more difficult to catch other teams and users. I reckon it's going to take 2.5, perhaps 3 years before the effects of the optimised clients have become irrelevant. That's why I was in favour of a backdating (it's not a banned word is it?) which would have mostly fixed things, or freezing the stats and starting from scratch again, alá D2OL.

Let me be really clear on this - I'm not saying there was cheating. What I'm saying is that the first 9 months worth of credits were basically multiplied by 3x what they really should have been. If there was a backdating then XS would still have approx 50% more credit than Free DC and the DPC and three times that of Anandtech. But people would be catchable again.

It's like a South American country that's had hyper-inflation, but the currency has been revalued so that money is sane again. Except prices have stayed the same, so it takes longer to save up for that 50" widescreen TV.

The backdating issue is closed any attempt to revive it has flame bait potential

I was actually trying to get back to a serious discussion.

If you have a contention with it, let's hear it.

This is an attempt to revive an issue that has been closed and that if reopen will get us into another flame war.

Backdating or lack of is still an issue with regards to the new credit system.

It handicaps the new credit system, because whilst the credit granting is now far fairer, it's killed the ability to compete.

I know if I put all my farm on Rosetta I'll have an RAC of probably 2.5K under the current scoring system. That means that if I went flat out from today using the current scoring system I'd get around 75k credits per month.

To find a decent example, I used Free DCs stats for all users, sorted them by amount produced in the past 28 days and then picked someone who I would have outproduced on the month, had I been running flat out on Rosetta for the past month, but who also had more credit than me. I picked Lazy from SETI.USA, he has over 1.4 million credits in total and has produced just under 50K in the past 28 days. Therefore, if I was to go flat out on Rosetta, I'd outproduce him by 25K a month.

Don't get me wrong, I know he has a whole lot more machines than me and could easily outproduce me if he spent enough time on Rosetta. I don't dispute that. He's also a random example, who I picked because he doesn't have his computers hidden. Assuming nothing changes, I could catch him in 57 months or so. That's a long time...

If we take a look at his active machines and their results, we'll see his machines, depending on what optimised BOINC client they are running, are claiming between two and four times what they are granted. So I'll say he overclaims by a factor of three, as a rough estimate.

Up until a month ago, people were awarded what they claimed. Therefore, just under 1.4 million of his credits were awarded under the old system. If we divide that by 3, given that's what I estimate his average overclaim to be, we get... ~460,000 credits.

Now if Lazy had 460K credits, which is a rough estimate of what he would have had we had the new credit system all along, then I could catch him in about 18 months.

Do you see the problem?

In my case it will take 39 months for the effects of the old credit system to be eradicated.

The new credit system was necessary to be fair, but it has made competition MUCH harder without backdating. So either backdating must happen OR stats have to be started again from scratch.

I'd like to hear opposing views and counter arguments.

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This should be fun to watch.

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Proudly Banned from Predictator@Home and now Cosmology@home as well. Added SETI to the list today. Temporary ban only - so need to work harder :)



"You can't fix stupid" (Ron White)

I'd like to hear opposing views and counter arguments.

It is unethical to change the rules ex post facto. In fact, it is illegal to makes such laws in the US.

In this case, people decided to crunch (or not) based on the rules & credit system as they were *at the time*. If the rules/credit system were different, they may have chosen otherwise, for example crunching for SIMAP. You cannot go back in time to allow them to re-decide, and you cannot replace rosetta credits with SIMAP credits. Therefore you cannot go back in time to change the rules.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

The real difficulty with back-dating credits is that it would change a lot of peoples current standing - to some that's a good thing, to others that's a bad thing.

I currently run around 3K credits for Rosetta per day. That's a decent amount, but nowhere near the top - even compared with people who've been running Rosetta for exactly the same amount of time as I have, I'm not at the top (but close).

Do you KNOW that Lazy actually got the credit from inflated credits (it's usually fairly easy to see if you look at a particular machine - but it's not definite, only way to determine that is to compare old and new credits for the particular participant).

My credit has actually gone up, since most of my machines are running Linux (for work reasons), and thus will get abour 2.5x the old credit, since the benchmark for Linux isn't quite as good as for Windows - but Rosetta runs just about the same speed for both OS's.

I also think you'll find that 3X is a little bit over what the overclaimers have been claiming - at least in general, there have been some extreme cases of course, but the really extreme ones have usually been "recalculated" already.

I'm not against back-dating - in fact it would push me further up the hill for no effort of mine, as my old Linux-scores would be bumped up all the way back to whatever date they decide to backdate to. But I also understand the argument that if you've "been paid" for something, there's only special conditions where you can be "forced to pay back overpayment". And that is realistically what we're talking about. And I don't think there's actually any DEBATE left that the credit will not be backdated. I'm pretty sure there was a message to that effect somewhere... [Actually, if the new credit system just affected the ones that have artificially inflated their credits, I'd think there's not so much complaints as the fact that a whole bunch of people with perfectly legitimate credit claims that would loose credit simply because they have a less powerfull processor, such as your machine https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=264786 & https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=132545 that has a "lowly" Duron processor - admittedly not giving much addition to your overall credit, but you'd probably loose about 20% of the Duron credits... Be carefull what you ask for ;-) ]

--
Mats

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Backdating or lack of is still an issue with regards to the new credit system.

It handicaps the new credit system, because whilst the credit granting is now far fairer, it's killed the ability to compete.

I know if I put all my farm on Rosetta I'll have an RAC of probably 2.5K under the current scoring system. That means that if I went flat out from today using the current scoring system I'd get around 75k credits per month.

To find a decent example, I used Free DCs stats for all users, sorted them by amount produced in the past 28 days and then picked someone who I would have outproduced on the month, had I been running flat out on Rosetta for the past month, but who also had more credit than me. I picked Lazy from SETI.USA, he has over 1.4 million credits in total and has produced just under 50K in the past 28 days. Therefore, if I was to go flat out on Rosetta, I'd outproduce him by 25K a month.

Don't get me wrong, I know he has a whole lot more machines than me and could easily outproduce me if he spent enough time on Rosetta. I don't dispute that. He's also a random example, who I picked because he doesn't have his computers hidden. Assuming nothing changes, I could catch him in 57 months or so. That's a long time...

If we take a look at his active machines and their results, we'll see his machines, depending on what optimised BOINC client they are running, are claiming between two and four times what they are granted. So I'll say he overclaims by a factor of three, as a rough estimate.

Up until a month ago, people were awarded what they claimed. Therefore, just under 1.4 million of his credits were awarded under the old system. If we divide that by 3, given that's what I estimate his average overclaim to be, we get... ~460,000 credits.

Now if Lazy had 460K credits, which is a rough estimate of what he would have had we had the new credit system all along, then I could catch him in about 18 months.

Do you see the problem?

In my case it will take 39 months for the effects of the old credit system to be eradicated.

The new credit system was necessary to be fair, but it has made competition MUCH harder without backdating. So either backdating must happen OR stats have to be started again from scratch.

I'd like to hear opposing views and counter arguments.

As to backdating being still an issue , I will refer you to Dr David Bakers, statement to this community on the issue where he gave his word of honor that there was not to be backtracking.

Do you want a man of honor to go back on his word?.

That said : enough is enough . The moderators have censored posts for less.
You are arguing something that is closed to argument.

Where are the zealots of the moderator corp now?

I think the fact that your posts have not been moderated out speaks volumes re selective moderation done in other cases.

To the moderators I say this: Biggles has enterd into a discussion that when others entered it after Dr Baker spoke , you were very fast in deletin, moderating and/or (in some moderator cases )disparraging the postters.

You cannot have it both ways: either all posts that break rules get moderated or none gets moderated.

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This and no other is the root from which a Tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
Plato

The real difficulty with back-dating credits is that it would change a lot of peoples current standing - to some that's a good thing, to others that's a bad thing.

I currently run around 3K credits for Rosetta per day. That's a decent amount, but nowhere near the top - even compared with people who've been running Rosetta for exactly the same amount of time as I have, I'm not at the top (but close).

Do you KNOW that Lazy actually got the credit from inflated credits (it's usually fairly easy to see if you look at a particular machine - but it's not definite, only way to determine that is to compare old and new credits for the particular participant).

My credit has actually gone up, since most of my machines are running Linux (for work reasons), and thus will get abour 2.5x the old credit, since the benchmark for Linux isn't quite as good as for Windows - but Rosetta runs just about the same speed for both OS's.

I also think you'll find that 3X is a little bit over what the overclaimers have been claiming - at least in general, there have been some extreme cases of course, but the really extreme ones have usually been "recalculated" already.

I'm not against back-dating - in fact it would push me further up the hill for no effort of mine, as my old Linux-scores would be bumped up all the way back to whatever date they decide to backdate to. But I also understand the argument that if you've "been paid" for something, there's only special conditions where you can be "forced to pay back overpayment". And that is realistically what we're talking about. And I don't think there's actually any DEBATE left that the credit will not be backdated. I'm pretty sure there was a message to that effect somewhere... [Actually, if the new credit system just affected the ones that have artificially inflated their credits, I'd think there's not so much complaints as the fact that a whole bunch of people with perfectly legitimate credit claims that would loose credit simply because they have a less powerfull processor, such as your machine https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=264786 & https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=132545 that has a "lowly" Duron processor - admittedly not giving much addition to your overall credit, but you'd probably loose about 20% of the Duron credits... Be carefull what you ask for ;-) ]

--
Mats

Again I am forced to point to the moderators. This poster is raising issues that have been considered closed and that got other posters moderated out, and being taken to task when they did it.

This poster is also using one of the words whose used you indicated was going to get moderating activity.

As simple as that: You cannot have it both ways. You deleted and moderated posts that reopened ( in your words) the closed issue of back dating. You cannot have it both ways. Either this is moderated out or you will be showing an inconsistency that borders in bias.

It is your time, moderators to shine and show the world by action whether you are consistent and unbiased.

---

This and no other is the root from which a Tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
Plato

I'll try one more time with arguments (or better questions), and hope not to get flamed.

Would you agree, that pre-change credit numbers don't reflect the work done, and that the credits granted varied too much to make substantiated assertions about the amount of crunching in comparsion with others?

Would you as well agree, that even if you only want to compare donated possibility of crunchpower (the PPC problem), it still didn't deliver anything comparable for all users?

Would you as well agree, that a real comparsion of work done or donated computer power would have been fine?

All this will lead imho to the conclusion, that the now impossible backwards adjusting would have been fine. Whether this would have been in the direction of the high level of "opt." clients or to the normal BOINC level is not important for this discussion.

I won't say it was illegal to use the "opt." client, it was just that the credits were only comparable with other users of "opt." clients, thus only useful for a minority in a competition. The majority of stock users had no chance to compete, neither with the benchmark based computer power donation method, nor with the work done method, the benchmarks were simply not comparable.

Edit:
It's over for now, the technical possibilities don't exist any more afaik, so it's just an academical discussion, but I don't see why we could not discuss this in a friendly way. Especially as it won't have any real consequnces because of it's lack of feasibility.

It is unethical to change the rules ex post facto. In fact, it is illegal to makes such laws in the US.

In this case, people decided to crunch (or not) based on the rules & credit system as they were *at the time*. If the rules/credit system were different, they may have chosen otherwise, for example crunching for SIMAP. You cannot go back in time to allow them to re-decide, and you cannot replace rosetta credits with SIMAP credits. Therefore you cannot go back in time to change the rules.

It works both ways though. There's a bunch of people who can no longer overtake other people so easily because of the new credit system and you can't allow them to go back and change their minds over running Rosetta in the past either. People decided to crunch or not based on the system that meant they could score a helluva lot of credit and overtake X amount of people in X number of days. That goalpost has moved as well.

My point is that the new credit system is only half of the way there. Either backdate or start from scratch.

Do you KNOW that Lazy actually got the credit from inflated credits (it's usually fairly easy to see if you look at a particular machine - but it's not definite, only way to determine that is to compare old and new credits for the particular participant).

No I don't know that all his credits were inflated. But all the machines that have visible results have claimed more than they were awarded, and it's highly unlikely that he installed optimised clients after the change of credit system.

EDIT - I am perfectly aware that I too would lose credit if there was a backdating. But I'd happily give it all up to properly correct the mistakes of the past.

---

I'll try one more time with arguments (or better questions), and hope not to get flamed.

Would you agree, that pre-change credit numbers don't reflect the work done, and that the credits granted varied too much to make substantiated assertions about the amount of crunching in comparsion with others?

Would you as well agree, that even if you only want to compare donated possibility of crunchpower (the PPC problem), it still didn't deliver anything comparable for all users?

Would you as well agree, that a real comparsion of work done or donated computer power would have been fine?

All this will lead imho to the conclusion, that the now impossible backwards adjusting would have been fine. Whether this would have been in the direction of the high level of "opt." clients or to the normal BOINC level is not important for this discussion.

David baker, the head developer for this project stated that there is no backdating that is Project Policy.
The moderators have delete and moderated out people for less when it comes to the issue of backdating and the use of some fighting words like over-claims, etc)

If this post and others are allowed to stand by the moderators, they will show and leave no doubts that they have taken sides and that they have been unfair and inconsistent in their moderating actions..

It is their call to prove those who have argued that they have taken sides and that they are not consistent wrong.

This is the time.

I won't say it was illegal to use the "opt." client, it was just that the credits were only comparable with other users of "opt." clients, thus only useful for a minority in a competition. The majority of stock users had no chance to compete, neither with the benchmark based computer power donation method, nor with the work done method, the benchmarks were simply not comparable.

Edit:
It's over for now, the technical possibilities don't exist any more afaik, so it's just an academical discussion, but I don't see why we could not discuss this in a friendly way. Especially as it won't have any real consequnces because of it's lack of feasibility.

David baker, the head developer for this project stated that there is no backdating that is Project Policy.
The moderators have delete and moderated out people for less when it comes to the issue of backdating and the use of some fighting words like over-claims, etc)

If this post and others are allowed to stand by the moderators, they will show and leave no doubts that they have taken sides and that they have been unfair and inconsistent in their moderating actions..

It is their call to prove those who have argued that they have taken sides and that they are not consistent wrong.

There is not a friendly way to discuss this. Specially after all the editing, moderating out and deleting done by the moderators. They decided to close any discussion and now if they allow it they will not be consistent with what they did to others

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This and no other is the root from which a Tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
Plato

The majority of stock users had no chance to compete...

Sure they did. Just upgrade the client like everyone else with the "competition" mindset.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

Jose, stop trying to be the thought police.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, the words "backdating", "optimised", "client" and a few others are not banned words. In fact, chances are I won't even get moderated for using the word "cheat" in a post, as long as I don't accuse anyone of being one. I haven't accused people of cheating. I have pointed out that the credit system for years to come will be skewed because all work done in the first nine months or so of the project with an optimised client is worth several times work done subsequently.

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