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SETI@Home vs. RC5

mosdef

Banned
I am currently doing SETI@Home but I could switch to RC5. I just saw one as being more significant than the other. Can I get arguments for both sides? Thanks!

-mosdef
 
Hmm ,this thread could easily trigger a flame war 🙁 ,so I'll try to be careful here!

As far as I see it's a choice between wether you want to help search for Alien signals or crack a 64 bit code.Everything else is secondary.
BTW why are you considering leaving us? (SETI)
 
Well I am only considering this because RC5 seems so big around here so I thought there might be a reason why people chose RC5 over SETI. I think SETI is far more important though.

-mosdef
 


<< Can I get arguments for both sides? >>

yes 😉 But I don't think anyone that's been here for awhile is willing to put down another contest in any way, shape, or form, because of what Assimilator said.

Here's how I propose you do this: Ask what the purposes are of whatever projects you might be potentially interested in, find out what other things you like about the project (stats, looks of stats, frequency of stats, number of occurances of stats outages, number of occurances of server outages, etc). I think that's the general idea of what you're asking, but I'd say that you should look for reasons, not arguments, and this subtle distinction will allay the fears of many of a flame way 😀
 
Well, my reason for doing RC5 is because its the one I started. IMO, it has the best stats (except for the occassions that stats go out...which usually isn't very often). They look pretty too 😛 But in all seriousness, I do it because I started it, because we were just a small team at first, and have just recently become the #1 team in the world because of all our members hard efforts. We have stiff competition from the Dutch Power Cows, who are nearing 2nd place, and could ursurp our position.

With S@H, the team is progressing very, very well. They are now...I believe 15th? I'm uncertain, but I know that they've made great headway, as they were battling to make it into the top 20 for quite some time. They've made it, and Hellburner updates stats daily, by hand, for the team (thanks hellburner!). He also does weekly stats updates.🙂

For me, its also a matter of efficiency. I try to do whatever is most efficient. For awhile, I was on my Cyrix machine, which is far more efficient at RC5 than any other project (due to it having a really crappy FPU). I am now on a (quasi-stable) athlon, which is doing....well, it might be doing a rotation of everything, because its good at evertying!

Why not tell us what machine(s) you have, and we'll tell you what they are most efficient at. If you don't care if its more efficient at one thing than another, and just want to do a particular project, we're all cool with that, and won't bother you about your choice 😉

Hymmmm........anything else?
 
My two cents' worth: do what you enjoy, what appeals to you. The TA RC5 crackers have their work cut out for them to stay ahead of the DPC, and the TA SETI probers have an exciting climb up the ladder ahead of them. For some people, the scientific value of a project is really important, too.
 
Frankly, I think there are both fairly worthless if your motivation is to be involved in some type of noble endeavor that will better the human condition, arguably Seti may be somewhat less worthless if you believe that the software would know an Alien if it found one...

I chose RC5 for the competition, the DPC's can talk some pitiful smack at times, though things have been rather peaceful of late. We're in a heated battle to hold onto first place and every PC helps!!

I like the stats in RC5 and they have been fairly dependable until recently. There is always the TA stats if Dnet is having trouble.

I should also mention the Seti Cavalry 😀, as an option for you--they're a group of Seti guys who switched some of their horsepower to RC5 to aid in the effort to hold off the evil DPC's. They have formed a mini-team which is open to anyone, but you can't track your indiviual stats unless you run a pproxy. Once we have vanquished the DPC's and found the key, I will switch at least one of my boxes over to Seti to repay the favor.

Bottom line, it's not important which one you select as long as it's for TA.
 
Well actually I don't have any computers dedicated to 'cracking'. I use my main computer which I do all my work on, and that is in the description below. If you want an idea of how I am performing, here are my SETI@Home stats.

-mosdef
 
Suppose you want to run BOTH RC5 and Seti, but not at the same time (obviously). Anyone know of a way to run some sort of automatic scheduling thingy that runs RC5 from 12am to 12pm and SETI from 12pm to 12am? Or something like that. Ideally it would be transparent, and run both programs as services so they never interfere with you. I guess for an NT/2k machine this would be easier to set up but I'm still not sure which programs I'd need to configure.
 
I don't know about scheduling them, but you can run Seti as a screensaver for when your PC is idle, RC5 will get all the spare CPU cycles when you're on the machine.
 
Neither will help you out in your everyday life, so they are pretty useless. I run RC5 for fun, and to help out TA. 🙂 I will switch some computers back to SETI and OGR when RC5 is done.

Like JimMc said:

Bottom line, it's not important which one you select as long as it's for TA.
 
BK

>>>But I don't think anyone that's been here for awhile is willing to put down another contest in any way, shape, or form, because of what Assimilator said.<<<<

eh? 😕 ,did I say he should chose one over the other?

I more or less agree with the rest of what you said though 🙂 ,I still feel that other issues related to the specific projects are secondary though 😛 😉

Mosdef

I hope that you stick with SETI ,with our battle to catch Nippon ,but its your choice of course .Do the project that you find most interesting 🙂
 
With the hours I've put in this far I doubt I'll switch, but I'm just wondering what the arguments for the two are.

-mosdef
 
I run both RC5 and SETI.

Right now I run RC5 for the TA SETI RC5 Mini Team also known as SETI Cavalry. You can get an easy install disk from Russ right here.

I run RC5 full time on my 700 Athlon. Athlons are good at RC5.

My P233MMX in not so good at RC5 and I think it gives more value running SETI. Because it is a slow CPU, I only run SETI in screensaver set to blank mode. It also runs RC5, but SETI has a higher priority setting so it only runs RC5 when I'm on it or when it run out of SETI wu's.

I feel that RC5 has value in the same way a drag race has value.
In my opinion, SETI may or may not find ET, but if we do, it could be the single biggest discovery in man's history.

BTW, Your stats look good to me. 🙂
 
mosdef as everyone has said it's just a matter of personal preference. Choose whichever one is more interesting to you.🙂

I personally like the seti stats more than I do RC5's but I do find the competition and trash talking between TA and DPC pretty amusing.😀

Personally I hope you keep crunching seti with us but if you decide to go with RC5 that's great also. As long as it's still for TA.😉
 
everyone's saying to run the client that you think is more fun..personally, I don't think either is fun. I do it b/c it helps society, so I would choose seti over rc5. but the clients that I'm running right now are dcypher (find ways to dipose nuclear waste safely) and popular power (find a cure for influenza).
 
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