Maybe, maybe not. I would have to do some longterm calculations on this, but point is that you will probably not gain much yourself. By the time you get the next WU from the same batch in, the effect of your previous claim will have diminished. Especially if the WU has had a lot of results reported already. Chances that some of your teammates gain anything are slim, too. And even if you do gain anything, fact is that other members/teams will have a higher chance of benefitting from you, unless you're in a team that is over half the active participants. So, you might be winning in actual points, but other teams will be winning more. So you're actually helping your opponents more than you help yourself.

Having said that, there's a loophole in that when someone reports their work in large batches (like 10 WU's). In that case, 9 out of the 10 would benefit (assuming that no ther WU's are sent by other members inbetween yours). Still, much more than 9 following your contribution would benefit....

Besides, your reasoning goes for the current system as well - and more so, because you gain immediately no matter what the effect on your next or teammate's WU.

G'day again LosAlcoholicos~Sloom

"Maybe, maybe not" - that uncertaintity would be enough for some individuals and/or teams to do what I'm hypothesising. That afterall, has been amongst the reasons given over the last weeks/months as to why optimised clients are used - "everybody else is using them" "team ?? are using them so why shouldn't we" "os ?? users are using them so why shouldn't we" "my cpu is disadvantaged compared to your cpu, so I'm using them".

"by the time you get your next wu from the same batch in" - what about mutiple hosts - same user multiple hosts? Never see the same wu type across multiple hosts?

For every cynical & devious idea I'm thinking up, I bet that there are ten more out there in the wild. Prove me wrong - and I say that without cynicism, because I hope that I am wrong. Only time will tell.

Looking at your post, there might be a very easy solution : people get the running average, BEFORE their claim is taken into account. This would make it useless to overclaim, in fact it would NOT give you more credits, but it WOULD give more credits to those that report WU's after yours. How's that for discouraging optimized clients? You would only benefit from overclaiming if you were actually the first to report a certain WU (what are the odds?). In all other cases, overclaiming would give more credits to everyone behind you - but not yourself, thus you would not get higher in the ranking - the opposite would be true.


Example : first guy reports, claims and gets 100 credits. You report, claiming 300, getting 100, setting the running average to 200. Third guy reports, claims 100, and gets 200, running average goes down to 166, etc....

G'day Los Alcohilocos~Sloom

If you overclaim you won't get the benefit on your first result, but you will on every subsequent result from the same type of wu. Sounds like a great incentive to me - not only can I doctor my subsequent credits but also those of all my teammates.

The fact that everybody else potentially benefits is not really a disincentive, if you and your teammates get your results before everyone else.

Potentially this means as a team you all set your runtime to the minimum, and your credit claims to the maximum.

First impressions of the new credit system.

It does nothing to address the use of optimised clients, the use of optimised clients will in fact be encouraged. The individual user may not get full benefit of their claim, but enough users reporting optimised results will heavily skew the granted credits. This promotes a "safety in numbers" type attitude - meaning it's harder to spot the overclaiming hosts.

By this I mean there is nothing to stop someone modifying their xml files such that they have benchmarks 1000 times greater than would actually be calculated by the standard client. How would that affect their results, if they happened to report first they would be granted their astronomical claimed credit. If they didn't report first, then they wouldn't immediately get any advantage from their claimed credit, however, that claimed credit would increase the total_claimed and have an impact on subsequent reporters by increasing the average. Every subsequent granted credit would be radically greater than it should be (what you may miss out on in your first returned result you would be granted in your second and subsequent results). It would only take a relatively small number of these rogue hosts to seriously skew the granted credits (upwards of course).

Now we get to the really insidious part. It's much harder to track down these rogue hosts, why? because of the obfuscation inherent in the system of averaging the claimed credits - all of a sudden everyone is granted more - but you can't track the culprits (unless Rosetta is prepared to, and nulify the falsified claims).

What does this mean - rampant inflation of credits.

I hope I am wrong, but on first reading of this credit system, it will actually encourage many people to claim whatever they want with impunity. They will not necessarily initially get the benefit of what they claim but they will get the benefit of every previous overclaimer.

If this occurs then the credit system will not actually reflect work done, it will reflect the ever increasing falsification of benchmarks.

Why will this happen - because no one has said that it shouldn't (therefore it must be allowed).

This is the part of a post I like best. I hope it's a hoax post, and Dr Baker never said such a thing. Roughly 90% of his active hosts fit this description

PLEASE--try to think about the science and the benefits to humanity, and ignore the taunts from the little guys--they just don't matter--and I hope all this will blow over soon. You have been making a fantastic contribution, and I would hate to see this cause any disruption to our collabortive efforts together.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1662478&postcount=20

This is ridiculous. A simple home-cruncher, leaving his/her PC on for only a few hours per day, could get stuck on one of those WUs indefinitely!

It does sound like a rather stringent requirement.

Is this going to be the norm. from here on out?

The plan is to try to have it checkpoint more often, or at least try to dump everything to a memory image at program swaps. But there is a lot of data involved, and interrupting the model effects the model outcome adversely.