System of badges :-)

Hi!

The following is just my personal opinion, I'm not speaking for the project staff here.

I must confess that I'm kind of old fashioned and I tend to think that it is sufficient to give the numbers for total credits and RAC, and that adding some discrete threshold steps where you would get some visual 'badge' or whatever doesn't add anything useful at all.

Another concern is this: should the badges be based on total credits or on RAC? E@H is active since 2005, and newcomers might get frustrated by the long time it will take them to catch up in order to get one of the highest medals, while others holding a badge for past crunching might even have ceased contributing and still enjoy the 'celebrity' status of a high badge.

In any case I want to avoid by all means the false impression that we only care about the power crunchers. The fundamental idea of BOINC has always been to harvest 'surplus' computation power, using PCs that are otherwise used for something else. I personally would not want to discourage anyone of this (far larger) user group by putting too much emphasis on competition for higher RAC or total credit numbers. I haven't done the statistics yet but I'm quite sure that most of the computing power of E@H is generated by casual users.

Also, there are more ways to contribute to Einstein@Home in addition to donating CPU and GPU cycles, e.g. by discussing problems and solutions wrt BOINC and the science apps in the forum, or simply by spreading the word about E@H.

But that's just my opinion. We are planning a complete overhaul of the forum and during this process, I'm quite sure the idea will be discussed internally by the project staff.

Cheers
HB

Can't really see what this "ranking" would do for me. But if you like to compete there is always BOINCStats: E@H sorted by RAC

Hi all!

Personally, I think that a badges system would be a great idea. I must confess that from time to time, I try others project than E@H and many of those project have a badges system. The first thing you have in mind when you earn a badge is to get the next one :)

I understand the concern of Bikeman, but personally, I don't think that newcomers will feel frustrated by those one that crunch for years to get those badges.

@Neil: It is true that with the growing computing power of new pc, the badges will become easier to get, but this is not different from Cobblestones. Some years ago, reaching the 1 000 000 credits with a P3 or P4 was a hard task, and now with a small pc with gpu, it can be reach in couple of weeks.

Moreover, as others noted, I think that a badges system would be a way to balanced the computing power. For exemple, it is simple to estimate the RAC/second of the different applications and decide to crunch only the ones that give the more RAC. With a set of badges for each application, it encourage cruncher to get all applications.

Also, it give a more fine tuned reward system than RAC and Cobblestones. For example, reaching 50 000 RAC of CPU power is not the same business then GPU power. Also, with applications specific badges, it rewarded the ones that does't necessarily have the more RAC, but involved since the beginning. It is a way of saying: "Look, you crunch 100 times more than me, but I make my effort too, a earn the S3 badge because I'm crunching here for many years!"

Just to give an example, this is the badges system of yoyo@home: http://www.rechenkraft.net/wiki/index.php?title=Yoyo%40home/badges
I think the system is well balanced, it is easy to get your first badges, but really hard to get the last ones.

In my opinion, a badges system will help to keep the participants involved (by regularly checking her account for new badges and in the same time, maybe see that oh, this computer stop crunching, I better check what happen!) more than discouraged or frustrated them.

Keep crunching!
Raph

+1 for badges.

As it's been said, when there's a badge system, I try to get more and more badges. In my opinion it's a really good system to keep participants in the project.