Fair comment. Largely because of Collatz, other projects went their own way, too, and broke the original plan of cross-project comparability.

And also broke any semblance of honesty in the reverse calculation of work done in petaflops across BOINC as a whole. that seems to have vanished from this website at long last, but David used to use a broken global estimate in his applications for money from the NSF.

The idea of credit new is good. The implementation is not. Collatz giving credit faster than everyone else is stupid and should be stopped.

Amen

Makes me glad I only look at credit as a way of spotting other problems.

The idea of credit new is good. The implementation is not. Collatz giving credit faster than everyone else is stupid and should be stopped.

the fact that Collatz has an impossible goal combined with its disproportionate credit award makes it especially egregious. useless project wasting computational resources crunching numbers for the sake of crunching numbers.

and to top it off, their results aren't even valid. their code/method is flawed.

Glory (well (partially).
After being patient enough, called council.
CT overpayment should be in bank approx. Tues week as will the energy rebate.
Reason given for so long is refunds are only done on Weds.

Grumble.
Amazing how "automatically" becomes manual.
Informed that it must be requested.
Asked about the energy rebate. Got asked questions.
After giving date of application & app number, got told "Oh, you should have received it by now".
Got given an e-mail address to chase it up.
WAS very calm & collected as I said "thank you, have a nice weekend" & hung up.
As for what I was actually thinking, ask me no questions & I'll tell you no lies.

Well said. I would rename that project as "Collatz Con-trick".

I'm glad that I am not the only one who feels strongly about collatz,

Neither have I got a maths degree, but I could follow the logical arguments outlined in another thread:

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=14159

Put simply, the Collatz Conjecture at Home project uses a sieve to remove a lot of data points, which is fine if only "invalid" data points are removed. However the sieve used throws out a lot of valid data points (and possibly misses a few of the invalid ones?). This is not "good science". In the project's defence it has stated that it is not interested in the absolute number of valid data points, but some subset of them, this ignores the act that part of the required proof of the conjecture requires that all the valid data points be listed in sequence, along with the actual number of data points.

I hope we don't go onto repeat the debate that took place in the thread I linked to, as that got diverted into a couple of (interesting?) sidelines, and with the Collatz Conjecture project "slumbering" we don't have ready access to any of their debates (if any?) on this matter.

(* Before anyone screams, I know that I've used "data points" instead of the more correct "computational steps".)

I'm sure there are many that fully understand it and could make a rival Collatz project that works correctly. Presumably it's not that hard to set up a Boinc server. I only have 32Mbit down, 7Mbit up here, but there must be someone with decent broadband that could host it.

Fully understanding the conjecture is not the problem as you suggest. However, there are many things I consider more worthwhile to have my computer crunching even were the project's method of testing the conjecture not flawed.

Perhaps so, but we might as well solve the problem properly.

There are mathematical conjectures where it has been proved that no proof or refutation is possible! I suspect an actual proof or otherwise of the conjecture if it ever comes will be through mathematical rigour rather than crunching which looks to me like it only checks that the conjecture is true for increasing values of n.

Edit: Obviously not as simple as proving if true for n then true for n+1 as in some more elementary proofs or it would have been done by now.

Pathetic Lewis Hamilton fans who need to boo Max Verstappen at Silverstone.

Pathetic Lewis Hamilton fans who need to boo Max Verstappen at Silverstone.

Agreed, it wasn't as if he was the one that made the decisions that were questionable.

This is taken far too seriously.

There are people who take any sport too seriously. My personal view is that the proportion of people who do so is directly proportional to the amount of money involved.

F1 is racing for OCD folk.

yikes! I ‘d rather avoid any “race condition”