djg2008 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 25, 2022 7:29 pm
I'm not really a sporting person, so understanding Formula One is not my area. I noticed one thing about these challenges. They seem to be all about the place. We need a unified approach to making challenges easy to find, all in one place, etc.
Hi djg
As a long term cruncher (going back to the pre-BOINC days of SETI@home) I can hopefully give you some opinions on the subjects you have raised.
Firstly, most projects themselves, create their own challenges, so that teams can compete against each other, and usually in celebration of some specific project-based reason. And projects organise the results into specific webpages so you can see how you are doing individually, as well as on a team-basis. And the whole idea of this is to generate more data for the project to use.
djg2008 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 25, 2022 7:29 pm
I stopped running BOINC back in 2004 when on SETI, I discovered my old account (albeit the CPID is not the same, so I can't seem to join the old data to my BAM data (even though it's not a lot and very old)). I only found out about this again this year, and I'd say given my situation - I have put a great deal of effort into running BOINC efficiently as I possibly can project wise - given the 18 year gap to make up for!
The CPID is based on your email address...and hence as long as you use the *same* email address for each BOINC project you have joined, then all your stats will be collated together. Of course, SETI@home has now shut down and so it may be that they are not exporting any more stats data and hence aligning your old SETI account with your new CPID might not be possible. If you can log into your SETI account using your *original* email address and password, then you can change the email address on your account to your current email address, and your SETI stats might then be "picked up" by your BOINC Manager account and also with the stats dsplayed on various project websites (as all your credits are also collected by every project so you can log in on any BOINC project and see all of your stats).
djg2008 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 25, 2022 7:29 pm
I also realise that I am not an advanced user, still a beginner really. Therefore I don't feel it is my place to throw suggestions, typically most people don't agree with my ideas anyway. I will keep an eye on challenges. I fear a lot of them are simply means to crunch certain projects/subprojects in rotation. I prefer to keep projects->subprojects in accordance to what I want to assist/uncover. Challenges takes me away from that to a degree - and specifically doing those last 2 CPU intensive challenges on PrimeGrid was not something I wanted to try and do (given I only have one quite good computer to do it on, the other is mostly incapable on many projects like LHC, Rosetta, PrimeGrid[CPU&GPU-Intensives]).
The biggest issue in recent years is that project applications are now getting more "data intensive" and hence to run BOINC tasks on some projects relies on you having recent hardware (with newer CPUs and newer GPUs). This relies on people investing in their host machines and for some this is not cost effective, if their basic computer is good enough for every other task they want to do on it.
And the idea of Challenges (either organised by the projects or by other teams, such as SETI.Germany with their "Pentathlon" or L'AF with "Formula BOINC", or indeed BOINCstats with their own Challenges) is simply to give many projects a huge boost over a short period of time, which can help their research, whilst at the same time giving a competitive edge to the whole idea of crunching data and, of course, some "team bonding" when numerous team members are all crunching at the same time.
djg2008 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 25, 2022 7:29 pm
It would be better I think if there was an alternative to challenges, using team/country/world standing measurements. I place nicely at the moment in PrimeGrid, NumberFields and Combined in the world and UK and Team (this will change over time). Also discoveries should weigh in too. But sadly this is something BOINC would need to code in as far as I am aware. It would be nice to see some proper Android development too, allowing more tasks not just WUProp/Universe/TN-Grid.
BOINCstats does this to some degree, as it collects members, teams, and country stats and displays them accordngly.
https://classic.boincstats.com/en/stats ... tStatsInfo
Android development is down to the projects and if they can afford the cost of re-coding WIndows/Linux/Mac tasks so to create specific applications that will run on Android...and of course the Android OS has changed a lot in previous years so, even if an app was created it might have to continuously updated to reflect how Andoid OS works...and of course as mentioned above, some project data needs quite powerful CPUs and on some mobile devices using Android, they simply do not have the "horse power".
Hope the above helps
regards
Tim