I'm finding much the same. My RAC went from 72 (up to result 4) to 59 (from result 5 onwards), whilst the granted credits are always between 64-75.
Hmms.. just found out it's gone down to 53 (15 results pending).
I have not found a single mathematical way to explain this, nor do any of the forums properly explain it, considering that I use just one computer.
Not that it really matters to me - as far as I'm concerned, they can remove the whole credit thing. I do this out of love for the subject and no other reason.
The point is the very subject matter, where accuracy is of the utmost importance.
RAC is something I've been playing with for months, and so I'll try to explain it to you. Not only is the number of credits important, but so is the frequency that these credits are sent to the server. I can't check if this is the situation for either of you because your computers are hidden (unhiding them is not a security issue; click on my name and then go see what you can about my computer).
So, I'll make up an example for you. lets pretend that your computers can only send WUs to the server at midnight, are validated immediately, and that all WUs recieve 60 credits.
The formula for calculating RAC has 2 parts.
First is the decay factor:
d(t)=e^((-ln2*t)/7)
where t is the time since the last calculation in DAYS (this is why I want intervals of 1 day between units coming in... makes it easier on me)
Then there's the calculation of the new RAC
RAC(new)=RAC(old)*d(t)+ (1-d(t))*credit(new)
Now, to make my life easier just one more time (ie cause I don't understand how to do this calculation AT ALL) we'll say that you've been putting in 1 unit of 60 credits every day for the past 2 months and your RAC at the beginning of this is exactly 60.
Then you will get following RAC (re-calculated daily):
Hi Farking and Agrippa,
..snip..
If you want to see the spreadwheet I used to calculate this, drop me a line at
eberndl at rogers dot com
I hope that this was useful... or else this was just me procrastinating REALLY well.
Thanks for replying, with a very readable answer :)
Problem is, even here you presume times where there is nil upload - I average 2 per day and _never_ nil.
So I'm still stuck :/
PS: I unhid my puter, but the server hasn't updated anything yet.
Never mind.. it's really going skew-iffed now.
Instead of the 6+ results, I'm now back to only 5 results, and my credit (of 533.17) no longer matches the actual credits now displayed (of 339.38).
WTF?
If results are going to be deleted, I'll be giving up the whole bloody idea.
Never mind.. it's really going skew-iffed now.
Instead of the 6+ results, I'm now back to only 5 results, and my credit (of 533.17) no longer matches the actual credits now displayed (of 339.38).
WTF?
If results are going to be deleted, I'll be giving up the whole bloody idea.
Before giving up on the idea, you might want to read the wiki docs at http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/ and the project plan. Credits are accumulated - nobody "deletes" credits. However, there is no reason to store individual results, that would just be a waste of disk space. The "canonical" result goes into a database. The result files returned by individual participants are left on disk for a couple of weeks (or more, depends on the project; most seem to give it at least a couple of months) and are then deleted. It is these individual result files you are looking at on the web site when you go through your account or your computer pages. Your credit is 533.17 - it's even visible under your name on your posting. Wherever you are getting the 339.38 (manually adding up the values of the results that haven't 'timed out' yet?) there is nothing "official" about that number, it's just something you have come up with somehow.
Update - I just looked at your account, and none of your results are old enough to have timed out yet, they are all still there. Did you not hit the link at the bottom of the page that says "Next 20 results"?
As far as "Recent Average Credit", well, you have 20+ results still "pending". Remember that any RAC number you are seeing is calculated based on GRANTED CREDIT - not "requested credit". Unless results you return just happen to be validated immediately, until you have significantly more "granted" than "requested", the RAC is truly totally meaningless. Once your results have built up to the point where they are being validated at about the same rate you are sending them in (minimum 2*deadline or 4 weeks, sometimes more) then and only then can anything at all be read into the RAC.
Many (most?) of us feel that RAC is a pretty meaningless number anyway. The "decay function" is currently not implemented correctly for most projects; if you simply quit sending in ANY results, once all your pending results are validated, your RAC 'freezes' instead of gradually dropping to 0 as it should. That's why the 3rd-party results sites do their own calculation of RAC. About the only thing RAC is consistently valid for is saying that someone with a RAC that consistently stays around 200 is doing approximately twice as many results as someone whose RAC consistently stays around 100. But as you can see from the example eberndl gave, these numbers can fluctuate significantly day-to-day; right now at SETI, because of the validator backlog, any given RAC is pretty much random! And the outage at SETI affected every other project - for example, my computers crunched a lot more Einstein while SETI was down, my RAC went up; SETI came up, my Einstein RAC dropped a LOT, as my computers tried to catch up on the SETI debt; repeat.
I hate to continually hear "be patient" from certain people on the various BOINC project boards... but in this case, what you are looking at simply won't be valid until you've been participating for another month or two, so "be patient" is about the only real answer I can give...
Thanks for replying, with a very readable answer :)
Problem is, even here you presume times where there is nil upload - I average 2 per day and _never_ nil.
So I'm still stuck :/
PS: I unhid my puter, but the server hasn't updated anything yet.
Yup, I did presume that there were times when none were uploaded... but your RAC only gets updated when units are validated (note that one of my assumptions was immediate validation). So, since you're unlucky enough to have 16 units pending... none of these have received credit and so they haven't been included in your RAC yet. Don't worry, they will be, but they have to get validated first.
The first WU you did shows up as being done on the 28 of August... but, because Einstein gives 2 weeks to return the unit, it can take up to that long for units to be validated on a more or less "steady state" rate.
And I'd just like to say thank you for unhiding your computer... if you want to hide it again once this question has been sorted out, feel free, but having this information available during troubleshooting is very VERY useful.
And I agree with Bill, that RAC can in fact fluctuate wildly... if you look at my sig, it appears that I'm doing a pretty good job crunching away at all my projects when in fact, I'm only working on CP right now, and it's RAC (~2) is way below the 662 credits I "deposited" 2 days ago.
But yes, that is the mystery of RAC. A mystery never fully explained.....
To both: Thank you! - excellently clear language even I can understand :)
I must admit I'm less miffed; my presumptions were based upon actual awarded credit, though.
According to my account there are 16 credits pending, not 20+
Again, thank you both for the explanations - it is a lot clearer; I just want to make sure the efforts of my poor old CPU aren't wasted, especially if it's possibly through something I may have done ;)
I don't really think I'd turn it off, simply because of the idea behind the project; how can you resist that?
Actually, I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to, in regards to timing out - not
something I was referring to?
The point was that the accumulated (total) credit, that is shown on my results pages,
does not match the total displayed, as it is here on the forum or the screensaver.
Quote:
Credits are accumulated - nobody "deletes" credits.
As the credits are intrinsicly linked to a successful result, it seemed a bit strange to me to
'lose' a result :/ Loss of credit doesn't worry me. Loss of a result does.
I did not, by the way, intend to imply that anyone as such would delete it.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I need to make sure I'm not the problem, as
it would then be futile for me to continue. Well, sorta.
On the "Results for user" page, the first page shows the following awarded credits:
8304390 1969660 1 Sep 2005 22:25:46 UTC 2 Sep 2005 12:53:45 UTC Over Success Done 19,074.55 71.98 65.12
8286363 1965410 1 Sep 2005 11:06:54 UTC 2 Sep 2005 1:54:34 UTC Over Success Done 19,575.38 73.87 68.46
8156954 1934777 30 Aug 2005 1:55:10 UTC 30 Aug 2005 15:04:00 UTC Over Success Done 19,469.30 75.42 68.09
The second page shows the remaining entries:
8090250 1918658 31 Aug 2005 1:42:18 UTC 31 Aug 2005 15:10:50 UTC Over Success Done 19,129.41 74.10 64.77
7905010 1875467 28 Aug 2005 9:02:57 UTC 29 Aug 2005 3:20:36 UTC Over Success Done 19,999.59 77.48 65.64
7878312 1869335 28 Aug 2005 1:10:34 UTC 28 Aug 2005 11:40:54 UTC Over Success Done 18,668.33 72.32 72.32
Actually, I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to, in regards to timing out - not
something I was referring to?
The point was that the accumulated (total) credit, that is shown on my results pages, does not match the total displayed, as it is here on the forum or the screensaver.
When I first read your posting, I assumed some of your results were old enough that they had been deleted - when I was able to look at your computer (and results) I saw that they were not that old.
Quote:
Quote:
Credits are accumulated - nobody "deletes" credits.
As the credits are intrinsicly linked to a successful result, it seemed a bit strange to me to 'lose' a result :/ Loss of credit doesn't worry me. Loss of a result does. I did not, by the way, intend to imply that anyone as such would delete it. As I mentioned in my previous post, I need to make sure I'm not the problem, as it would then be futile for me to continue. Well, sorta.
It is hard to explain... no results are ever "deleted" in that from every quorum, a result is selected as the "best" and that result is declared to be the "canonical result" and is stored in a database. The raw data file your computer returned is then no longer necessary to the project - it is kept on disk for "a while" (weeks or months) for your convenience in looking back a ways to see what you have done. Unlike Classic SETI where the only thing the user had to judge their work was a "count of results" (please note that only the COUNT - and of course the canonical results in the database - was kept, the files themselves were deleted there as well) with BOINC you get credits that vary with the size/complexity of the WU. This is the replacement for the "count" we had in Classic SETI. There is no equivalent "count" with BOINC; the physical number of WUs you have done over the life of the project is stored NOWHERE. Not on the web pages, not on your computer, nada. It simply doesn't matter. Some projects may have WUs that take 5 minutes and other WUs that take 5 days; the guy who gets a cache full of 5-minute WUs would have a higher "count", but who cares? If they both work for 5 days, and one person does 1 "big" WU, and the other does 1000 "little" WUs, they would both have the same credit. With Classic SETI where the ideal was for all WUs to be the same size, the count mattered.
So... yes, after you've been participating long enough, the "number of results shown on the web page" will stop increasing, or may even decrease once in a while. Your oldest result files are being deleted, so the disk space required by the project does not tend towards infinity. Meanwhile, the database holding the canonical results continues to grow, at 1/4 or less the rate that storing all the results would take, and your credit score continues to grow. These results aren't "lost" - it's just that the extraneous data that came along with the actual data is cleared out once in a while, and that means that you as an individual can't always say "well, I've done 22,968 WUs" - you can only say "I've earned 563,941 credits".
Quote:
On the "Results for user" page, the first page shows the following awarded credits:
8304390 1969660 1 Sep 2005 22:25:46 UTC 2 Sep 2005 12:53:45 UTC Over Success Done 19,074.55 71.98 65.12
8286363 1965410 1 Sep 2005 11:06:54 UTC 2 Sep 2005 1:54:34 UTC Over Success Done 19,575.38 73.87 68.46
8156954 1934777 30 Aug 2005 1:55:10 UTC 30 Aug 2005 15:04:00 UTC Over Success Done 19,469.30 75.42 68.09
The second page shows the remaining entries:
8090250 1918658 31 Aug 2005 1:42:18 UTC 31 Aug 2005 15:10:50 UTC Over Success Done 19,129.41 74.10 64.77
7905010 1875467 28 Aug 2005 9:02:57 UTC 29 Aug 2005 3:20:36 UTC Over Success Done 19,999.59 77.48 65.64
7878312 1869335 28 Aug 2005 1:10:34 UTC 28 Aug 2005 11:40:54 UTC Over Success Done 18,668.33 72.32 72.32
That would now make the total 533.17?
Well... that adds up to 404, not 533, or as your sig now says 598. My apologies for not using a calculator last time to actually understand what you were saying. Something is messed up - you're right. What it LOOKS like, is that there was once a 2nd computer on your account that has been "merged" into this one, and we are not seeing the results that it returned. (Possibly even the same physical computer, if you detached and reattached to the project, or hit "reset" at the wrong point.) Or there is a 2nd computer on your account that is still hidden. Or the credit fairy liked you and gave you a signup bonus of almost 200 credits. I can't prove any of that, and it could be something else entirely; I'm lost now.
Well... that adds up to 404, not 533, or as your sig now says 598. My apologies for not using a calculator last time to actually understand what you were saying. Something is messed up - you're right. What it LOOKS like, is that there was once a 2nd computer on your account that has been "merged" into this one, and we are not seeing the results that it returned. (Possibly even the same physical computer, if you detached and reattached to the project, or hit "reset" at the wrong point.) Or there is a 2nd computer on your account that is still hidden. Or the credit fairy liked you and gave you a signup bonus of almost 200 credits. I can't prove any of that, and it could be something else entirely; I'm lost now.
This is starting to go off topic, but that's part of the problem I'm referring to.
The totals shown on my results pages, do not match the total of the actual awarded credit, as shown in my sig.
At the moment my sig reckons it's 731, which, with only 8 awarded credits, would mean that I'd be getting over 91 credits on average.
My actual total at the moment is 537.24 - a difference of some 193.
Due to a housefire earlier this year, I can count myself lucky to have anything left over. I have only one computer, there is and was never more than this one I am using now, so I have never had the need to merge, nor would this have had any effect.
This (total) is the only part that has me confuddled, still :/
Average Credit
)
I'm finding much the same. My RAC went from 72 (up to result 4) to 59 (from result 5 onwards), whilst the granted credits are always between 64-75.
Hmms.. just found out it's gone down to 53 (15 results pending).
I have not found a single mathematical way to explain this, nor do any of the forums properly explain it, considering that I use just one computer.
Not that it really matters to me - as far as I'm concerned, they can remove the whole credit thing. I do this out of love for the subject and no other reason.
The point is the very subject matter, where accuracy is of the utmost importance.
I am confuddled :/
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?
Hi Farking and
)
Hi Farking and Agrippa,
RAC is something I've been playing with for months, and so I'll try to explain it to you. Not only is the number of credits important, but so is the frequency that these credits are sent to the server. I can't check if this is the situation for either of you because your computers are hidden (unhiding them is not a security issue; click on my name and then go see what you can about my computer).
So, I'll make up an example for you. lets pretend that your computers can only send WUs to the server at midnight, are validated immediately, and that all WUs recieve 60 credits.
The formula for calculating RAC has 2 parts.
First is the decay factor:
d(t)=e^((-ln2*t)/7)
where t is the time since the last calculation in DAYS (this is why I want intervals of 1 day between units coming in... makes it easier on me)
Then there's the calculation of the new RAC
RAC(new)=RAC(old)*d(t)+ (1-d(t))*credit(new)
Now, to make my life easier just one more time (ie cause I don't understand how to do this calculation AT ALL) we'll say that you've been putting in 1 unit of 60 credits every day for the past 2 months and your RAC at the beginning of this is exactly 60.
Then you will get following RAC (re-calculated daily):
DAY Credits (new) RAC
1 60 60
2 0 54.34
3 120 60.53
4 60 60.48
5 60 60.44
6 0 54.74
7 0 49.58
8 60 50.56
9 0 45.79
10 60 47.13
11 0 42.69
12 60 42.32
13 0 40.14
14 0 36.36
15 120 44.24
16 0 40.07
17 60 41.95
18 0 38.00
19 0 34.41
20 60 36.83
If you want to see the spreadwheet I used to calculate this, drop me a line at
eberndl at rogers dot com
I hope that this was useful... or else this was just me procrastinating REALLY well.
RE: Hi Farking and
)
Thanks for replying, with a very readable answer :)
Problem is, even here you presume times where there is nil upload - I average 2 per day and _never_ nil.
So I'm still stuck :/
PS: I unhid my puter, but the server hasn't updated anything yet.
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?
Never mind.. it's really
)
Never mind.. it's really going skew-iffed now.
Instead of the 6+ results, I'm now back to only 5 results, and my credit (of 533.17) no longer matches the actual credits now displayed (of 339.38).
WTF?
If results are going to be deleted, I'll be giving up the whole bloody idea.
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?
RE: Never mind.. it's
)
Before giving up on the idea, you might want to read the wiki docs at http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/ and the project plan. Credits are accumulated - nobody "deletes" credits. However, there is no reason to store individual results, that would just be a waste of disk space. The "canonical" result goes into a database. The result files returned by individual participants are left on disk for a couple of weeks (or more, depends on the project; most seem to give it at least a couple of months) and are then deleted. It is these individual result files you are looking at on the web site when you go through your account or your computer pages. Your credit is 533.17 - it's even visible under your name on your posting. Wherever you are getting the 339.38 (manually adding up the values of the results that haven't 'timed out' yet?) there is nothing "official" about that number, it's just something you have come up with somehow.
Update - I just looked at your account, and none of your results are old enough to have timed out yet, they are all still there. Did you not hit the link at the bottom of the page that says "Next 20 results"?
As far as "Recent Average Credit", well, you have 20+ results still "pending". Remember that any RAC number you are seeing is calculated based on GRANTED CREDIT - not "requested credit". Unless results you return just happen to be validated immediately, until you have significantly more "granted" than "requested", the RAC is truly totally meaningless. Once your results have built up to the point where they are being validated at about the same rate you are sending them in (minimum 2*deadline or 4 weeks, sometimes more) then and only then can anything at all be read into the RAC.
Many (most?) of us feel that RAC is a pretty meaningless number anyway. The "decay function" is currently not implemented correctly for most projects; if you simply quit sending in ANY results, once all your pending results are validated, your RAC 'freezes' instead of gradually dropping to 0 as it should. That's why the 3rd-party results sites do their own calculation of RAC. About the only thing RAC is consistently valid for is saying that someone with a RAC that consistently stays around 200 is doing approximately twice as many results as someone whose RAC consistently stays around 100. But as you can see from the example eberndl gave, these numbers can fluctuate significantly day-to-day; right now at SETI, because of the validator backlog, any given RAC is pretty much random! And the outage at SETI affected every other project - for example, my computers crunched a lot more Einstein while SETI was down, my RAC went up; SETI came up, my Einstein RAC dropped a LOT, as my computers tried to catch up on the SETI debt; repeat.
I hate to continually hear "be patient" from certain people on the various BOINC project boards... but in this case, what you are looking at simply won't be valid until you've been participating for another month or two, so "be patient" is about the only real answer I can give...
RE: Thanks for replying,
)
Yup, I did presume that there were times when none were uploaded... but your RAC only gets updated when units are validated (note that one of my assumptions was immediate validation). So, since you're unlucky enough to have 16 units pending... none of these have received credit and so they haven't been included in your RAC yet. Don't worry, they will be, but they have to get validated first.
The first WU you did shows up as being done on the 28 of August... but, because Einstein gives 2 weeks to return the unit, it can take up to that long for units to be validated on a more or less "steady state" rate.
And I'd just like to say thank you for unhiding your computer... if you want to hide it again once this question has been sorted out, feel free, but having this information available during troubleshooting is very VERY useful.
And I agree with Bill, that RAC can in fact fluctuate wildly... if you look at my sig, it appears that I'm doing a pretty good job crunching away at all my projects when in fact, I'm only working on CP right now, and it's RAC (~2) is way below the 662 credits I "deposited" 2 days ago.
But yes, that is the mystery of RAC. A mystery never fully explained.....
To both: Thank you! -
)
To both: Thank you! - excellently clear language even I can understand :)
I must admit I'm less miffed; my presumptions were based upon actual awarded credit, though.
According to my account there are 16 credits pending, not 20+
Again, thank you both for the explanations - it is a lot clearer; I just want to make sure the efforts of my poor old CPU aren't wasted, especially if it's possibly through something I may have done ;)
I don't really think I'd turn it off, simply because of the idea behind the project; how can you resist that?
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?
Actually, I'm not sure I
)
Actually, I'm not sure I understand what you're referring to, in regards to timing out - not
something I was referring to?
The point was that the accumulated (total) credit, that is shown on my results pages,
does not match the total displayed, as it is here on the forum or the screensaver.
As the credits are intrinsicly linked to a successful result, it seemed a bit strange to me to
'lose' a result :/ Loss of credit doesn't worry me. Loss of a result does.
I did not, by the way, intend to imply that anyone as such would delete it.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I need to make sure I'm not the problem, as
it would then be futile for me to continue. Well, sorta.
On the "Results for user" page, the first page shows the following awarded credits:
8304390 1969660 1 Sep 2005 22:25:46 UTC 2 Sep 2005 12:53:45 UTC Over Success Done 19,074.55 71.98 65.12
8286363 1965410 1 Sep 2005 11:06:54 UTC 2 Sep 2005 1:54:34 UTC Over Success Done 19,575.38 73.87 68.46
8156954 1934777 30 Aug 2005 1:55:10 UTC 30 Aug 2005 15:04:00 UTC Over Success Done 19,469.30 75.42 68.09
The second page shows the remaining entries:
8090250 1918658 31 Aug 2005 1:42:18 UTC 31 Aug 2005 15:10:50 UTC Over Success Done 19,129.41 74.10 64.77
7905010 1875467 28 Aug 2005 9:02:57 UTC 29 Aug 2005 3:20:36 UTC Over Success Done 19,999.59 77.48 65.64
7878312 1869335 28 Aug 2005 1:10:34 UTC 28 Aug 2005 11:40:54 UTC Over Success Done 18,668.33 72.32 72.32
That would now make the total 533.17?
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?
RE: Actually, I'm not sure
)
When I first read your posting, I assumed some of your results were old enough that they had been deleted - when I was able to look at your computer (and results) I saw that they were not that old.
It is hard to explain... no results are ever "deleted" in that from every quorum, a result is selected as the "best" and that result is declared to be the "canonical result" and is stored in a database. The raw data file your computer returned is then no longer necessary to the project - it is kept on disk for "a while" (weeks or months) for your convenience in looking back a ways to see what you have done. Unlike Classic SETI where the only thing the user had to judge their work was a "count of results" (please note that only the COUNT - and of course the canonical results in the database - was kept, the files themselves were deleted there as well) with BOINC you get credits that vary with the size/complexity of the WU. This is the replacement for the "count" we had in Classic SETI. There is no equivalent "count" with BOINC; the physical number of WUs you have done over the life of the project is stored NOWHERE. Not on the web pages, not on your computer, nada. It simply doesn't matter. Some projects may have WUs that take 5 minutes and other WUs that take 5 days; the guy who gets a cache full of 5-minute WUs would have a higher "count", but who cares? If they both work for 5 days, and one person does 1 "big" WU, and the other does 1000 "little" WUs, they would both have the same credit. With Classic SETI where the ideal was for all WUs to be the same size, the count mattered.
So... yes, after you've been participating long enough, the "number of results shown on the web page" will stop increasing, or may even decrease once in a while. Your oldest result files are being deleted, so the disk space required by the project does not tend towards infinity. Meanwhile, the database holding the canonical results continues to grow, at 1/4 or less the rate that storing all the results would take, and your credit score continues to grow. These results aren't "lost" - it's just that the extraneous data that came along with the actual data is cleared out once in a while, and that means that you as an individual can't always say "well, I've done 22,968 WUs" - you can only say "I've earned 563,941 credits".
Well... that adds up to 404, not 533, or as your sig now says 598. My apologies for not using a calculator last time to actually understand what you were saying. Something is messed up - you're right. What it LOOKS like, is that there was once a 2nd computer on your account that has been "merged" into this one, and we are not seeing the results that it returned. (Possibly even the same physical computer, if you detached and reattached to the project, or hit "reset" at the wrong point.) Or there is a 2nd computer on your account that is still hidden. Or the credit fairy liked you and gave you a signup bonus of almost 200 credits. I can't prove any of that, and it could be something else entirely; I'm lost now.
Thanks for the reply BM
)
Thanks for the reply BM :)
This is starting to go off topic, but that's part of the problem I'm referring to.
The totals shown on my results pages, do not match the total of the actual awarded credit, as shown in my sig.
At the moment my sig reckons it's 731, which, with only 8 awarded credits, would mean that I'd be getting over 91 credits on average.
My actual total at the moment is 537.24 - a difference of some 193.
Due to a housefire earlier this year, I can count myself lucky to have anything left over. I have only one computer, there is and was never more than this one I am using now, so I have never had the need to merge, nor would this have had any effect.
This (total) is the only part that has me confuddled, still :/
Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
Earth.com corrupted.
Reboot Universe (y/n)?