I thought about this when I first joined also. If a person just donated CPU time and the system dynamically allocated the bulk of processing power to the most urgent task then it would make more sense.

The user would still have a preference. However, a certain percentage of their CPU time would still go to the most urgent taskings that BOINC uses. The workunits might have similiar numbering schemes making them look identical so the user would never know what his computer was working on. He would only know he is getting credits for doing something good. Maybe, it would give him a detailed report of what his computer has worked on.

Either way, Fight aids@home could probably be knocked out in 2 seconds by temporarily reallocating a small amount of power from things like seti@home or other sources where CPU power is abundant and maybe even somewhat useless for the current time being.

I don't think the BOINC projects are centrally networked or cooperate into one entity tho.

I think this is a good point even so. Human nature is not that of cooperation alot of times tho.

The problem with reality is that not everybody understands the reality of today and almost nobody knows what tomorrow will be. Well, OK, I do but I'm not telling, insider trading issues and all that.

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Reuters, Nov 27, 2009

Scientists from the FAAH project announced today that none of the drugs from the various Distributed Computing projects will be useful in the fight against AIDS. All have been ruled out for 1 reason or another. The project's leading scientist said, "Thanks crunchers. We had great hopes but it just didn't pan out. To show our appreciation for all the hard work we're doubling everybody's points across the board."

Meanwhile, Babelfish has finished translating messages following SETI's initial discovery back in August 2007. It's now obvious the messages have 3 important pieces of information that will benefit all of mankind:

1. a fix for the BOINC benchmarks so Linux users can get fair credits
2. a cure for AIDS
3. the long sought key to cold fusion which will give us virtually unlimited pollution free energy at almost zero cost.

The aliens provided the information after Cadbury told them how to put the caramilk inside the chocolate. The alien response was, "Doh!", followed by the aforementioned 3 informations. Messages were transmitted on the sub-space channel first envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in the Star Trek series and made a reality by North Korea as a byproduct of their nuclear research program.
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Don't tell me it could never be.

Hi

I don't understand the motives of many people regarding many subjects. Isn't that fantastic? Vive la difference! My perspective on why WCG is better than seti would be shared by most in this community so any argument would be redundant here. There are of course similar projects to WCG so why this one? That's personal choice and although I don't understand the choices made by others I understand that they are valid choces for the individual concerned and that's good enough for me.

On a personal note, I switched to WCG from Folding@home because I found a link somewhere stating that the scientists working on the human proteome project thought proteins might fold very slowly rather than the previously unchallenged theory that they folded very rapidly. It's easy to see that somebody is likely to be wrong in one of those views and F@H has more CPU power to investigate its theory than HPF. Simple choice, help investigate the other theory so that a definitive conclusion can be reached more quickly and resources can be funnelled into the best theoretical likelihood. One must investigate all theorum in order to eliminate possibilities. No possibility should be ignored until proven non-viable

.Cheers. ozylynx

People just do not invest any resources into something they are not interested in. The total compute power is probably much larger with everybody being independent from each other ... only stricktly following one's ego.

Btw - interest is not predictive: I tried to stimulate local and regional AIDS support groups (hospices, societies, ...) towards promoting FAAH on their web sites. I did not even get a reply. Sometimes it apparently is not even sufficient to do something of somebody's interest to get any positive action out although no serious resources are required.

SM

If you think about it, nobody would be crunching FAAH today if it were not for the contributions of physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Those people gave us the transistor, large scale integrated circuits, high density hard drives, optical drives, 100MBPS ethernet, fiber optics, broadband internet and many other tools that FAAH needs. If you think DC projects like LHC, Einstein, Reisel Sieve and Prime are not worthy of CPU time then maybe you should think again. They may not be medical research but they may very well discover stuff that benefits medical research in a major way. Solving puzzles, for example, may seem like a silly pastime to some of us but there are some very complex and interesting mathematics behind puzzles and games, probably some very cool computing science too. It may seem silly on the surface but I suspect there may be worthwhile research going on behind the scenes. It is entirely possible that with their puzzles they may discover a new principle or refine an existing principle that eventually contributes to a breakthrough in AIDS research. It is entirely possible that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will discover something about the fundamental structure of matter and energy that will allow transistors 100 times smaller, faster or cheaper so we'll have even more powerful computers with which to crunch FAAH.

Finally, rather than lamenting the fact that a few hundred thousand crunchers are hunting aliens or solving puzzles, I think we could get a lot more done if we stopped spending money on wars and used that money to buy a thousand Blue Genies for the scientists. Think of all the money that Bush spent in Iraq and figure how many Blue Genies that would have bought. Or how many programmers could have been hired to fix the deficiencies in BOINC, Rosetta, HPF2, etc.

Think also of all the dollars spent on oil that is/was way overpriced just because of wars. You see, it's not really the alien hunters that are slowing down FAAH it's people like president Bush.



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This post has been edited to comply with forum rules - nelsoc