7im wrote:I will admit that having high scoring clients does have the appearance of devaluing the older clients, though not true because no points values have been reduced.
This is happening without a doubt. My 8 x 1.6 GHz instances of 5.04 client only adds up to about 800 points/day while 4 x 2.4 GHz on SMP adds up to around 1500 points/day. That again brings me back to the great equalizer: time. My 8 cores consumers more power than your 4 cores and that shows in terms of execution time spent. Yours is more efficient but mine is spending more time in contributing. Both should be valued--not in terms of work accomplished because the clients weigh heavily on that but the important thing here is the people and the effort they put into it. It takes me hours to get all 8 clients downloaded and running, it costs an enormous amount of power to run that EATX motherboard, 6 HDDs, and 8 x 1 GB ECC sticks of memory. What am I really contributing to the project?
I don't care about the work accomplished because that is solely determined by the efficiency of the clients. I care about the time I am letting you use, free of charge, on my hardware. You should value that time I contributed more so than the actual hardware. As with anything free, you get what is given to you. You should be
rewarding my donated processor time, not my donated hardware.
7im wrote:But none of the alternatives are any better. If your remove the link between points and scientific production to make the older and newer clients score more evenly, then the value of points becomes zero, arbitrary, pointless (pardon the pun). And then how does one compete at all when there is no measure of performance? That's not an improvement, IMO.
The measure of performance is in efficiency. Since clearly the GPU clients are the only ones that
are efficient, I really think this aspect has become moot; however, in order to satisfy those that do fold competitively, all you got to do is run some numbers on the processor time, processor count, and WUs...
It has been said many times that the points are, for all intensive purposes, pointless. I wholely agree because it has been clearly demonstrated that there is little science to the point system. It is completely and utterly broken. The people that live for points can still have them but the main factor in determine contributions should not be the broken point system, it should be processor time.
7im wrote:The issues of points vs. performance has been debated for as many years as the project has been running, and no one has yet to suggest a change that would be a win-win for all parties involved. I wish I could point you at the multipage rants from the old Folding Forum that went on for 10s of pages, and still didn't come to any workable improvements.
I am growing more and more convinced that the software is not consistent enough for it to even be a subject of debate. F@H is not a means of benchmarking systems. SuperPI is. If that is one of F@H's objectives then wow, a lot more effort needs to be put into standardizing the core of all clients. I know this isn't going to happen so again, I stress the importance of donated processor time. It is something readily available, clearly shows contributions, and from it, can calculate hardware contributions (in terms of power using the power formula).
7im wrote:You can't add points to the CPU clients without devaluing the work us CPU folders done over the last 6 years, or without devaluing the much higher amounts of science the faster clients are producing. And if you reduced the points given to the GPU clients to make the CPU clients more competative, then all the GPU users complain. You can't steal points from one type of client without offending the other types. And because scientific production is why we are all here, I think it best to keep the points tied to that.
Average the amount of time it took per WU over the past 6 years, multiple it time the number of WUs, and make that the base processor time. All past work is effectively accounted for. The clients should be completely irrelevant in terms of donations and only relevant to competition which is completely separate.
7im wrote:P.S. I'm not trying to disuade anyone from trying to suggest improvements, but please consider that the topic may have been beaten to death many times over already. Sorry.
Then beat my suggestion to death and we'll try to come up with a comprise that makes everyone as happy as they can reasonably be. Like I said, I would be happy just by displaying the total processor time contributed. I really don't care about the points system because, for all intensive purposes, it is broken beyond repair. In fact, I doubt there is a way to fix it. Hardware and clients just vary too much. That's why it is critical to break it down to a lower, fundamental level. The one thing that is constant across all users, all hardware, and all clients.
I do believe that the power formula (power = WU / time) would promote competition among high end contributors far better than the current points system. In order to get the highest number, they would have to have exclusively powerful computers in order to get a high score. If the number of active processors is thrown into that formula, it could offset the weaker ones the user is also donating as to not damage their score.
.........
Let me break it down. There is three important variables:
-Work Units completed (directly impacted by hardware and clients)
-Total thread time (tangible donations)
-Folding threads active (user effort)
The score is some how derived from those three. An infinite number of scores could be derived from those values. One possible formula is:
Score = (WU / Time) * Active Threads
The important thing, I think, is to make donated time more important than actual scores. Scores should be competition centric and constantly evolving. That is, if someone quits donating, it shouldn't take long to pass them them up for at least the short term. But in terms of contributions, it should be based on thread time and maybe to a lesser extent, the number of active threads. As contributors, those are the
only two variables we can control. They are tangible, absolute, and don't change in significance over time.
Active threads and thread time accounts for physical contributions and WUs completed drives those that fold competitively to do better.