I want them BOTH! Not all people are the same, and each person is motivated in their own way. The basic science completed doesn't care what the motivation was of the contributor. In this case, more research completed is just plain better. Rick

Very few will hopefully decide solely based on points, but the point-system being used can be part of the decision. Example, from the science-point-of-view, which is "better" between HCC and Folding@home? Both does cancer-related research (FAH also non-cancer-related)...

Personally I can't say the science of either of these two project is "better" than the other and would guess it's the same for majority of crunchers, meaning 50/50-split based on science.

On the non-science-part on the other hand where's the client, server-stability and point-system. Depending on individual users, they can put these parts at example 60/40, 40/60 and 50/50, while another would example put 40/60, 60/40 and 90/10. For the 1st. of these users it's basically a coin-toss if they decides to run HCC or FAH, neither project has any big advantage in any of the possible categories. For the 2nd. on the other hand, the point-system of one of the projects is the deciding factor since science, client and server-stability is roughly equal between projects.


While badges is useless and points isn't really worth something, I'll not agree with you making decisions based on points is useless.

While points by no means is perfect, a computer using N hours to crunch example 100 wu's, and a computer using N/2 hours crunching the exact same 100 wu's, should both get the same amount of points. But, the computer using N/2 hours to finish the work, should get roughly 2x more points per hour than the computer using N hours to do the work.

Meaning, if you've got a choise to pay $$$ for computer A that can get N points/day and computer B also costing $$$ but would get 1.5N points/day, obviously computer B is the better one since it will use less time than A to finish the same amount of work, and therefore also can do "more science".

Note, this is as long as you're comparing points within the same BOINC-project. Trying to compare between BOINC-projects won't work.

Just to add a tech's two cents to the discussion:

1) The credit logic we use now is the logic used by Seti@Home. We do a few things differently, but not anything that should tip the balance. However, as the results show, we do not line up with the credit award by Seti@Home. This is something that we need to analyze and understand. We have not had sufficient available time to dig into this in depth (to get to the bottom of it we need to track how the credit progresses over time which will involve outputting more data than the system is capable of doing now and then analyzing the progression over time). This is unfortunately, not trivial and thus hasn't been undertaken yet.

2) The issue of credit equivalence certainly matters to some people. One of the things we are looking at in the survey data is the size of the population that does see credit as a determining factor vs other factors. There has always been an abundance of great ideas on how to recruit and retain the volunteers but a limited capacity to do a successful implementation of those ideas. We want to prioritize what will yield the best results in terms of both new volunteers and long term engagement from our existing volunteers.

3) We have issues with credit internal to our own projects that we still have to resolve. This will take precedence over issue #1. Unfortunately, this also is something that will take a good chunk of time to figure out and resolve.

I am just really upset that i was four days late to the party

That closely resembles my experience, but I believe SIMAP is also a project worthy of my spare computer cycles. . . if/when it runs out of work, I'll be here, crunching mass quantities of WCG.