Megor writes "Well it was bound to happen, people are cheating on Seti@home to inflate their work unit statistics, and the people who administer Seti are ignoring the complaints. ZDNET has an article explaining how they are cheating."
Interesting paper on this subject
by
taviso
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.
-- ex$$
Re:SETI Checking?
by
phragle
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· Score: 5, Informative
Seti does check,
As I understand it, for each unitl they send a number of redundant units out and then compare the evetual results taking the most popular result to be the correct result for that unit.
one of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.
Theres more information in the setifaq, section 1.3.6
Re:Motivation?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm not an anonymous coward. My handle in seti is EG, I crunch for EXDC and am a member of ARS technica.
One of the cheats actually indexes the name of the wu. the name of the wu contains data that locates the data to a chunk of the data tape.
by indexing the same file name over and over to bypass the duplicate checking routines, you are introducing wu's that do not correlate to their proper location in space. Resubmit such a wu thousands of times with the name indexed each time it's sent destroys the baseline of the science database. Copy the same wu to 1,000 other people for submission multiplies the error a million fold. it is very conceivable that there might be whole chunks of wu's results that cannot be scientifically normed to ANY location on the starmap! It does effect the science data.
Official Word: not a problem for the science.
by
SETIGuy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yet another overblow cheating report. Frankly, it doesn't really impact the science. The cheaters only process a small fraction of the total data and candidate identification doesn't rely on either a single result or a results from a single work unit.
Lets keep the the scope of the problem in perspective. What these guys are worried about is being in first place in the stats. I understand their concerns, but right now we have neither the funds nor the manpower to share them. Perhaps when SETI@home is shut down, and SETI@home II is running, we will go back and adjust the totals. Perhaps not.
SETI@home II will run under BOINC and will have more immunity to such exploits. The cost of such immunity will likely be a GUID for each machine running BOINC, in addition to a per user key pair.
This, of course, will get slammed by privacy advocates. Hell, if Microsoft were doing it I'd slam them.
Right now our priorities are
Keeping everything running.
Identifying candidates for reobservation at Arecibo (sometime in the next 4 months or so).
Building the SETI@home II data recorder.
Getting Astropulse running as part of the BOINC beta.
Finding enough funding to keep us running.
Designing the SETI@home II analysis code.
Sorry, but fixing the stats can't be a priority right now. The extension of that to "SETI@home doesn't care about cheating" is extrapolating too far.
Slashdot Mirror
Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.
ex$$
Seti does check,
As I understand it, for each unitl they send a number of redundant units out and then compare the evetual results taking the most popular result to be the correct result for that unit.
one of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.
Theres more information in the setifaq, section 1.3.6
and on this usenet thread.
its a very interesting topic.
ex$$
I'm not an anonymous coward. My handle in seti is EG, I crunch for EXDC and am a member of ARS technica.
One of the cheats actually indexes the name of the wu. the name of the wu contains data that locates the data to a chunk of the data tape.
by indexing the same file name over and over to bypass the duplicate checking routines, you are introducing wu's that do not correlate to their proper location in space. Resubmit such a wu thousands of times with the name indexed each time it's sent destroys the baseline of the science database. Copy the same wu to 1,000 other people for submission multiplies the error a million fold. it is very conceivable that there might be whole chunks of wu's results that cannot be scientifically normed to ANY location on the starmap! It does effect the science data.
Yet another overblow cheating report. Frankly, it doesn't really impact the science. The cheaters only process a small fraction of the total data and candidate identification doesn't rely on either a single result or a results from a single work unit.
Lets keep the the scope of the problem in perspective. What these guys are worried about is being in first place in the stats. I understand their concerns, but right now we have neither the funds nor the manpower to share them. Perhaps when SETI@home is shut down, and SETI@home II is running, we will go back and adjust the totals. Perhaps not.
SETI@home II will run under BOINC and will have more immunity to such exploits. The cost of such immunity will likely be a GUID for each machine running BOINC, in addition to a per user key pair. This, of course, will get slammed by privacy advocates. Hell, if Microsoft were doing it I'd slam them.
Right now our priorities are
- Keeping everything running.
- Identifying candidates for reobservation at Arecibo (sometime in the next 4 months or so).
- Building the SETI@home II data recorder.
- Getting Astropulse running as part of the BOINC beta.
- Finding enough funding to keep us running.
- Designing the SETI@home II analysis code.
Sorry, but fixing the stats can't be a priority right now. The extension of that to "SETI@home doesn't care about cheating" is extrapolating too far.Support SETI@home