Top 10 Folders & Future Prizes/Contests

[Apoptosis]

For those of you going by the point system rankings are as follows:

1 Apoptosis
2 Illuminati
3 infinitevalence
4 ericm.
5 GNome
6 Jennifer
7 Capper
8 Jeremy_W
9 JakeGub
10 Pretty_Lady


If you look at Work Units Completed we have

1 infinitevalence
2 Apoptosis
3 Illuminati
4 ericm.
5 GNome
6 Capper
7 Jennifer
8 natorius
9 Pretty_Lady
10 Nails

Great job everyone. We have folded over 550 work units in only a couple weeks and we are helping out great scientific research.

If any of you can think up some contest for folding that is fair or fun let me know. I'd be more than happy to pull some "tested" hardware off the shelf and send it out as prizes. I have some PC-4000 memory, some bay drives, heat sinks, and other random hardware that could help you fold better.

[Amy]

What if you did something like this:

Set a definite period of the contest, say, you check the ranks at 7pm CST on Tuesday, and then check again at 7pm CST on Monday.

Have 2 simultaneous contests: one for points, one for work units. For each person, divide the number of points/WUs by the number of active processors in the past 7 days.

[Bio-Hazard]

Just so you all know, I started with 3 systems folding for you all today..........Look out, here I come.................

[Illuminati]

For each person, divide the number of points/WUs by the number of active processors in the past 7 days.

That won't work because people like me who run dual-boot windows/linux show as having different processors for windows and linux even though it is the same machine. Folding thinks they are two different computer systems, when, in fact, they are the same box.

[T-Shirt]

Now that the weather is cooling off, I might be ready to fold again. 3 computers running keeps it comfy in here down to about 20ºf outside

[Amy]

For each person, divide the number of points/WUs by the number of active processors in the past 7 days.

That won't work because people like me who run dual-boot windows/linux show as having different processors for windows and linux even though it is the same machine. Folding thinks they are two different computer systems, when, in fact, they are the same box.

What if we each physically had to "enter" the contest by pm'ing Apoptosis with our computer info, and he can divide it up fairly into categories based on # processors or speed or something like that? Also, that way he wouldn't have to figure out contact info for people who aren't members of the forum.

[eric m.]

i think that penalizing people because they are able to get multiple processors is not fair. i'm sure all of us have friends and family that we can get to sign up using our name and team number, to help boost the score. i was looking at some of the top guys from australia and what-not and they have upwards of 50 processors sometimes. that is a little extreme, but in the end they are helping the overall cause more than anyone else because they have more processing power. so they deserve to be #1.

if points were given on a WU/processors basis, the #1 guy could be some person with one well balanced computer who is slowly but surely cranking out points, but only has a couple thousand, even though he is not contributing as much in real terms.

i know this is kind of controversial and it's easy for me (and some of the other people here with multiple CPUs running) to object to the point/CPU or WU/CPU method since it would pretty much totally take us out of the running for any contest here, and we would be forced to shut down all processors except our fastest one or two, which goes totally againt the point of this whole project. i think if someone signs up and has 100 processors going 24/7, they should be rewarded. that's awesome. just my opinion. i hope i don't start a controversy here.

[Immortal]

i folded for Tweakers Australia and once guy was IT manager at a school and had put F@H on all 150 school computers... thats how u churn out WU's!!!

Im sure if we all get family members and stuff to join in we can do well, we shouldnt turn folding into a competition as some of us arent as lucky as others to have top of the range computers or access to many computers.

Researching to aid mankind isnt a competition its a common goal for everybody.

[Apoptosis]

true, just bounching some ideas around! ;)

[Amy]

i think that penalizing people because they are able to get multiple processors is not fair.

What I was suggesting is not penalizing people for having multiple processors. There would be multiple winners, at least for the contest I was suggesting. The reason is because there are people like me who have absolutely no access to multiple processors. If you have 3 processors running, great! You'd be competing against others with 3 processors running, rather than competing with people with just one or 10 processors running. Does that make sense?

[eric m.]

maybe it can be a thing like anyone who gets a certain about of points or WUs gets a tshirt or something.

[NAiLs]

Sounds like an idea to me! :D

I wish I knew how this point system worked though. I spent almost 2 days doing oine unit and it gave me 50 points, where I did one that took me 16 hours and got like 150. I'm doing one now that is currently taking 18 minutes a frame @ 100% processor speed. You also got people with less WU's completed than others and they have more points..? Weird if you ask me!

[infinitevalence]

How do you decide how much credit a work unit is worth?

How do you determine how many points a work unit is worth? Before putting out any new work unit, we benchmark it on a dedicated 2.8GHz Pentium 4 machine with SSE2 disabled (more specifically, as reported by /proc/cpuinfo on linux: vendor_id : GenuineIntel, cpu family : 15, model : 2, model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz, stepping : 9, cpu MHz : 2806.438, cache size : 512 KB). This machine runs linux, so all WUs are benchmarked with the linux core.

We plug the results of this into the following formula:

points = 110 * (daysPerWU)

where daysPerWU is the number of days it took to complete the unit. This equation was chosen to match the points for previous Gromacs WUs to the previous point system. The upshot is that Tinker WUs will be worth more than before we set up the new points (i.e. before April 2004).

Thus though i have lots of CPUs running most are not fast and therefore take longer to do one task, which yeilds lower points. Since i cannot afford to buy lots of P4EEs and FX's i use lots of old P3 to make up the difference. I will always turn out lots of WU's but never lots of points untill i have faster CPU's.

[eric m.]

ok so maybe there can be a multiple processors class, and a single processor class. the top people in each group will win a prize, say...2gb RAM or an X800 video card. something small like that.

just kidding. a tshirt or sticker would be fine.

[Amy]

ok so maybe there can be a multiple processors class, and a single processor class. the top people in each group will win a prize, say...2gb RAM or an X800 video card. something small like that.

just kidding. a tshirt or sticker would be fine.

That is similar to what I was trying to suggest.