Site Folding rig "competition" or worthy award?

Mainframeguy

Debiant by way of Ubuntu
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Take a look here please guys and give your input on the idea.

The primary question is mods and site owners opinions on if this is a good idea (should get a lot of hits, but maybe not the right ones?).

The secondary question is can we get more than present offers of GFX and RAM? And who/how would it get put together.

And the last one is dependant on positive to both above - what rules and regs and terms for it - which would need another thread again no doubt....

Will follow this thread with interest - even if it is to hear EP hates idea and locks it down!
 
Yeah I saw, is worth thinking about but then you get the issue of why reward new folders when we have got quite a few who have been hard at work folding for us for quite some time now.

Would be nice though and I am sure we can work something out if we can come up with a good solution.
 
Electronic Punk said:
... but then you get the issue of why reward new folders when we have got quite a few who have been hard at work folding for us for quite some time now...

simple solution here - make the folding comp over a fixed start/end date - so that if an existing folder can max out their units or co-opt a serving farm they maybe could win? Or make rules that it has to be home machines (hard to validate though!)? This should be details that could be sorted - and whatever happens it is pretty certain to be good for folding team and, maybe, for site?
 
I see :)
Over what kind of period is easiest to monitor?
And is there a way of cheating? (because obviously that would be bad)
 
unsure - would suggest a calendar month might be a fair WTG with maybe a calendar months notice on that - so EG - announce Jan 1st and start monitor Feb 1st through to Feb 28th - can have weekly progress then....

I cannot see any way to cheat so long as:-

1. We take from official folding site - we could make a screenie at start.
2. Entrants must provide a cert. from the site that we can also validate by generating ourselves with their "entrant" name and (obviously) OSNN team number.
3. Same must be provided at end of comp. (and validated by "us").

The further rules to prevent cheating are dependent on form of competition rules - do we allow folks to "band together"? - I would suggest this must be individuals only. Do we allow people to co-opt office machines etc? (real hard to prevent, but possible because you COULD ask for photo evidence of folding processors entered! This gets real extreme and would put off people I think). What ideas do others have? How far do we go to ensure this is just a fun competition? Maybe best to ship all parts to the winner - up to them to assemble?

Oh yeah and one last thing - if this is anything REAL bad it could just be possible I may have a Neo2 to donate for the prize rig hehe - only half kidding.... would kinda mean SOMEONE had to be generous enough to donate a 939 socket CPU though! Anyone? :p ;) :cool:
 
Great idea in theory, here are my .02 on the issue....

First off, I think the biggest hurdle would be fairness. First off, Steevo has been the #1 folder since I have been a member, and the most consistent we have. I doubt anyone will ever catch him, but who knows. Personally, I was a folding stud for some time, and now Fitz appears to be in that role, although I don't really track the stats anymore, so I'm not sure. BUT, that also raises the point, that people simply don't have access to as many machines as others. I think the only real way to make this fair, is to put a machine restriction on it, (client count), or put classes, as follows:

1-3 machines
4-6 machines
6+, etc.

This way someone who has 1 or 2, has a chance of winning in their "class" as someone with 15, which would normally be not even close to fair.

I think a one month calendar period could suffice, in regards to time. This gives people a cool chance to track it over the time frame, do things to change their machines, etc.

On another note, however, people who have folded for awhile know switches, tips and tweaks, that others who would be starting simply for the contest would not be priveleged to.

As I said, good idea in theory, but we might have to put some work into planning and pimping it.
 
It could just be a random drawing of all members that have been folding for a while. Hold the drawing in say July of next year.
 
Or mebey we could get a CS server together. As far as the rest, I would kindly pardon myself from the race.
 
While I would love to take home a new machine.. I think it will be very hard to make it fair. People that have access to multiple machines would always have an advantage. In theory, if I really wanted to, I could put another 15+ servers to work for myself (plus some desktops that are in pieces in our lab right now).. would that be fair? Not really.

I think it would be too hard to validate people weren't cheating if we set out restirctions. If we have no restrictions, there are only a few people really in contention.

A graduated drawing entry may work.. 1 entry per point returned up to 10 points.. if you return points between 10-100 you get 1 entry for each 10 points returned.. if you reutrn points between 100-1000, you get 1 entry for each 100 points returned.. etc

But, if this is a nice rig, do we really want to leave it all to chance?
 
OKie OKies - calm down all you folks that think this would be unfair....

I already tried to show just how "fair" we could make this - let me add some details...

Machine count would be irrelevant and MIGHT be a bad idea - why? Because we will simply divide any entry by the CPU count to get the score! So it is not about brute force in total points - it is all about how far your can tune a rig AND keep it up to win. Heck even folks on dial up have a chance (so long as they do not allow much idle time before they post/get WU's.

In essence this competition will favour one or two - and those would be the folks with access to the top range processors (but not the multi-core, since that would count as > 1 CPU). But rest of system will matter, and ability to tweak folding settings, and overclocking will help you so long as you can stay stable.

I still say this sounds fun - so long as we nail down rules and keep it fun (by which I mean prize is no way some Alienware heap oh junk, but clearly known to be used parts that assemble to make a decent rig - or may be used as deemed best by the winner...)

Heck we can even do second and third place prizes and a wooden spoon if we get enough donation offer - and c'mon guys - I already offered GFX and (maybe) mobo.. we had some RAM maybe offered... what else guys? Because without the total makings of at least one rig we have no prize = no comp!

and yeah - in answer to fitz - chance will play a little part - but I think over a month skill will play more (although it WOULD be real bad luck to lose by <600 points and have a unit around 90% complete! Then again that is a great example where a skilled folder would tweak settings at end to crunch up small units and not take biggies!)

Can we have more posts with others feelings on this idea?
 
Just love the thinking that's going into this but ..... Have we forgot one tiny thing?
We want to encourage NEW FOLDERS to join the effort as well as maintain our existing folding team.
How do we use this to excite new folders and get them to join our team???
We have a lot of inactive folders in our list - can we reingage them for this comp too?
 
Not overlooked that at all sharob....

the whole thinking here is actually beyond what you have said...

the way I see it, done right, this should get hits from way beyond just OSNN members, and of course they will sign up to OSNN as the first step to enter....

So we get a few things -

New members to OSNN
New folding members in OSNN
Renewal of inactive folders
Something for active folders to do
Entertainment for others who want to "spectate"

There you have it - if we wanted to take things further we could try a post to see how the folding forum feels about our idea and who knows where that may lead?
 
Mainframeguy said:
Not overlooked that at all sharob....

the whole thinking here is actually beyond what you have said...

the way I see it, done right, this should get hits from way beyond just OSNN members, and of course they will sign up to OSNN as the first step to enter....

So we get a few things -

New members to OSNN
New folding members in OSNN
Renewal of inactive folders
Something for active folders to do
Entertainment for others who want to "spectate"

There you have it - if we wanted to take things further we could try a post to see how the folding forum feels about our idea and who knows where that may lead?

This is why I suggested the Idea
 
There are obviously greater minds than mine working on this :nervous:
I think it's a great idea.
 
The other part of this endeavor is that the winner will have to commit to folding 24/7 for some period of time. We all know that our home machines use some electricity when left on 24/7. My home machine is only on 24 over the weekend and also on some weekdays. My machine at work is on 24/7 since I need to access it when I am home. My other machine at work used to be shut down over the weekend, but I leave it on 24/7 now to fold.

The slightly higher electric bill is the "payment" for the folding machine.
 
tom9094:

I have calculated the electricity bill, per year it would come out to approx $40 or so here in New Jersey. That is not a lot, so yes they should commit to it folding 24/7 at least for 6 months or so.

I do that anyways, I have my desktop folding, and a PC that is currently in the closet, literally. And they are both on 24/7.
 
X-Istence said:
tom9094:

I have calculated the electricity bill, per year it would come out to approx $40 or so here in New Jersey. That is not a lot, so yes they should commit to it folding 24/7 at least for 6 months or so.

I do that anyways, I have my desktop folding, and a PC that is currently in the closet, literally. And they are both on 24/7.

I'd say $40 or so for electricity is well worth a new rig ;)
 
^ bump ^

Because I said I would....

(yeah, OK so I am a little late! It's been busy here! :smoker: :cool: ;) )

[EDIT] oh yeah - and may I pimp trhis thread in my sig? [/EDIT]
 
OK, to toss some ideas in there, we can issue a validation to new folders. Something like an extra ticket, just for signing up. If you are already folding you get a ticket. the period should be measured over 3 months that way anybody who signs up but does not follow through, has their tickets invalidated. This should enocurage new folders while also the ol' fold-alongs. In terms of tickets we have what 30 active folders, with any new signups this would add 2 tickets for signup to win the alotted equipment/computer. This would make the actual contest look like a pretty good deal to new folders.
 
nice ideas FG - thought I would bump the thread and see if there are any more ideas out there or any "takers" to get this rolling...
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
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