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Cheating at Seti@home
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"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
Motivation? (Score:5, Insightful)
SETI Checking? (Score:5, Insightful)
One common technique used by cheats is to distribute partially completed work units to other team members' SETI@home accounts. One account is used to process a work unit until it is 99 per cent complete. It is then distributed hundreds of other team members who process the remaining portion of the unit and return it. The WU is credited to their accounts vastly inflating the quantity of public processing that appear to be dedicated to the project.
Let's assume cheating is going on, and is being perpetrated in this manner. Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted and say "Gee, here's hundreds of people from the same team submitting the same WU with the same result within minutes of each other. Seems awful suspicious!"
Seems awful suspicious.
Ahem. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a variety of excuses people have for doing such things, such as
* making the program calculate units faster
* falsifying unit completion and results
* hoping they cheat enough so they can get up the top of a table
These people dont realise the problems with doing such things, If you contaminate the results with fraudulant and false data then you might as well forget about the whole project.
What happens if there really was something found, but due to the high rate of contamination that it was thought to be too good to be true and discarded. Consequences really need to be thought out before you start wrecking the hardwork of scientists and academics who are only doing a service for everyone's benefit.
it's been happening (Score:5, Insightful)
People tend to loose sight of the fact that Seti@Home is for scientific purposes, and get caught up in the statisitics of it all. I'm in to the statisitics, so i'll load more computers with the Seti@Home client, not cheat.
Re:This can't be that big of a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Allowing something like this to go on just undermines all credibility of the project. I'm sure a lot of people would be turned away from participating in SETI@Home 2 (if/when it happens) if they know that this type of stuff is going on. I mean, this is something that has been explicitly brought to the admins attention, and they are just ignoring it. What would make anyone think they are going to take a proactive role in seeing that this type of stuff doesn't happen in the future?
Re:SETI Checking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if this is the case, the point remains that one group handing in 300 redundant copies of the same data processed the same way will skew the results. What if the guy who processed the first 99% had some kind of screwup along the way, and his team hands in 300 copies of his screwed-up data? The other 3 people who got the same WU and got the right answer will be 'outvoted' by Team Cheater, ruining the whole effort (for that particular chunk of raw data, at any rate).
what about peer review? (Score:5, Insightful)
if this is
One possible response... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seti@home may just sit back and silently allow these people to continue putting work into cheating, then at the close of the copmpetition throw out all bogus results.
Sort of getting revenge by letting them waste their time for another two months.
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It's too competitive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Listen to the guy in the article:
"Basically, three years of work to get to the top of the teams and eight million WU later, it looks as though the top team is going to be beaten by cheating," said Nealon.
Sure, the stats are fun. But once you make a competition of it, people are going to start cheating - doesn't matter if the only reward is seeing your name at the top of your group in some brute force number-crunching exercise. Even the legal users care mostly about where they are in the stats, not about the point of the project itself. I mean, look at the popularity of ProgressQuest.
If I were SETI@Home, I'd remove the stats. Sure, you'd lose humungous amounts of CPU power when the $r1p7 kiddies abandon the project, but if you're getting millions of WUs of flawed data sent back to you, you need to do something drastic. Besides, they've got a pretty strong brand by now, and I'm sure a lot of users would stick with them just for the good of the cause, not just for the dubious honor of being at the top of the stats.
Re:SETI Checking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ultimately the league tables are just a bit of fun to entice more people into getting involved, Seti@Home probably doesn't care about who leads the tables in the slightest, only about getting a result. As long as they are confident that a positive result will not slip by unnoticed, why get involved in an resource wasting arms race with the cheaters?
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
If they see the same ID being submitted by more than one system, zero the work unit totals for both machines.
BOOM! Cheating now carries a very high price.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? (Score:2, Insightful)
int main()
{
read_data_from_server();
compute_bogus_validator();
send_bogus_results_to_server();
}
and since I have the *source*, it is very easy to read and interpret (don't need to know ASM or anything or deal with decyphering of disassembled code).
Yes, you can fix bugs and submit the changes to fix the source tree but you make it *much* easier for cheaters to cheat if they want (and quite possibly enable more people to cheat).
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SETI will fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bear in mind that even amongst cultures on earth, perceptions of timescales vary. I've heard the phrase "In Europe they think 100 miles is a long way; In America they think 100 years is a long time". Imposing human values on a hypothetical alien race is somewhat anthropomorphic...
Re:SETI Checking? (Score:2, Insightful)