My "Yes" on delisting Moo

in #gridcoin7 years ago

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Moo Wrapper is a BOINC proxy for the distributed.net projects and is distributing work to participate in the RC5-72 challenge, a challenge ran by RSA Security from 1997 to 2007. The goal was to find the cryptographic key given a cipher text and Moo is currently working on solving an RC5 encrypted text with a 72-bit key using brute force. Do note that RSA have already ended the contest and this is a continuation of it run by distributed.net.

The project is whitelisted in Gridcoin as of right now but is up for delisting via community voting. This is why I vote for removing it.

While writing this post I noticed that @dutch posted pretty much the same thing in Should Moo! Wrapper be Removed from the Whitelist?. His post goes into more detail regarding RC5-72 so go read that first then come back here.

Disclaimer

It is very likely that I have misunderstood the point of the RC5 challenge. This post is also going to be aimed from my personal perspective, given my personal views of Gridcoin and what we should strive for. Also, when I write "Moo" I am referring to the RC5-72 subproject, not the entire Moo project itself. Given that the project is capable of solving other problems but just focus on the RC5 one, my statements still hold true.

Note that we have intentionally left Distributed.net OGR-project out of scope since you can already join that project at Yoyo@Home.

Project Outcome

In the Gridcoin Hangout #48 we discussed the poll and why the project should or should not be delisted. I tried to compare this to Bitcoin mining which I still think holds true. You are given the answer and try to find the question. At least with Bitcoin mining the problem solving would serve a purpose whereas with Moo we are merely trying to solve an arbitrary problem with no real outcome. I would be very surprised if we whitelisted a SHA256 solver.

One could argue that this is the same as the Enigma@Home project where the goal is to break the remaining Enigma machine ciphers. That is true, they both try to do the exact same thing. The difference is that cracking enigma codes holds historical value and the codes were not published for pointless bruteforcing.

Note that in the hangout I made a statement where we should only be including research projects. After giving it some more thought I have realized that this is a dumb requirement. Not only is it a stepping stone to endless discussions whether a project is research or not, but it also shuts the door for projects which do work with a usable outcome but is definitely not research. One example of this is BURP which is a video and image rendering farm.

Magnitude Distribution

In Gridcoin there is a set total magnitude to distribute among all the projects in each superblock. This magnitude pool is divided equally, regardless of the project's intent or participant size. This means that including one project reduces the rewards of all its sibling.

Now, if magnitude instead was based on crunching performance including small, or "toy" projects if you will, would not be an issue. Magnitude would go where crunchers go even if it's just to a project checking if today is Tuesday. However, given the limited magnitude pool I feel it does not make sense to allocate reward resources to a project which will not have a concrete, useful outcome.

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Are we looking at selective participation to the detriment of users with older or less powerful systems or are we going to continue to be objective about this and allow full and equal participation?

Perhaps, with a little initiative ( say talking to them ), we can get Moo to create another OpenCl project that the community as a whole considers more useful. That way less fortunate users may also participate in a 'useful' project ..

Maybe, as they have been whitelisted for such a long time, the foundation could create a bounty for either a replacement OpenCL project crunching useful data by Moo Wrapper or a new project using OpenCL as a replacement?

"SCIENTIA HUMANA LIBERTAS"

boinc
Courtesy of @joshoeah

I briefly heard something about older hardware when I joined in the middle of the hangout discussion but I didn't quite catch what you guys were talking about. Is it that they support very old compute engines or very early OpenCL versions? If they can create an application which does something useful then I'd gladly embrace them.

I don't think we should let hardware support influence project selection at all unless the project in question only supports some super obscure platform. However, we so have a large community and should be able help the open source projects supporting older hardware by providing them with code and test assistance if that is something we want to strive for.

i don't really think it's about hardware support, as much as it is about Gridcoin becoming the deciding factor as to what science is valuable/worth crunching. this is very dangerous territory, and the removal of moo has set precedent to a degree.

i know the argument is "they don't have to crunch Gridcoin-whitelisted projects", but that's also very out of line with "we encourage all new users to join Gridcoin"... and i contest that we removed a large portion of magnitude from lower-end GPU users, and shunted it to people that could already afford more capable cards, i.e. whales.

i can't get my older AMD cards to run on anything but moo. even collatz is throwing errors lately... that said, i would argue collatz is a more useless project than moo, as it doesn't have a finite goal. this is exactly why personal opinion has to be kept out of it. otherwise, we'll be left crunching 3 "approved" projects, and the laughing stock of the distributed community.

we should not seek to remove projects outside of extenuating circumstances such as sourcefinder, or there is evidence of cheating/spoofing.

also, you also touched on something @fkinglag and i were talking about recently... we are trying to get together some developers to make opencl and cuda apps for even simple parallelization of cpu-only BOINC projects. it could end up being one of our more valuable contributions to BOINC. <3

Which AMD card do you have? I have a Radeon 6950 which I use for Milkyway. It's not great but it chugs on.

I think as long as we have the reward structure we have with projects taking rewards from the shared pool we do need some restrictions on which ones to include. I would much more prefer a shared pool with rewards based on individual relative contribution but we don't have a solution for that :(

i have a 4870, a 5450, a 5670, a 5770, an r9 270, and an rx 560. last two do amicable.

Delisting means they can hide a multitude of sins;-)

I have written a rebuttle to the claim that the project is not useful here:

https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@guk/defending-moo-wrapper-and-distributed-net

dutch also cause all that trouble with ODLK and ODLK1 and hit n ran after whitelisted and opinions are like buttholes and everybody has one and they all stink , we need a whitelisted marijuana project since its science related.. see your opinion on what is legit science is 1 person in a world of how many humans ? ok lets ignore those who are not into science , ok less how about those whom are not interested in Boinc or run Boinc? So obviously those whom run moo , myself included have opposite opinions and views... Check this out , are you aware that most of history and science is just hypothesis and when things are re-visited get proven wrong and things are discovered where we have evolved as a scientific community and beings to process and understand and adapt where we found flaws... So Pluto should never had been demoted ? Should we not do research to find planet #9 or even to re-name Pluto as a Planet vs a Planetoid? When Plato said Venus was the last planet in the sky should they have just said " OK LETS PUT IT TO A VOTE " oh wait they did and people opposed it and they proved it wrong... Personal feelings and opinions like a tell Darwin off , people like to shut science down. Anyways , since you mention dutch thanks for helping show the integrity of Gridcoin's leadership and that we need a real foundation and the current people whom were left " access and the keys " need to be replaced.. Got to love how dutch hit n ran on odlk1 and like gunde and others just ride the RAC doing a few WU here and a few WU there on initial WL to earn as much $$$$$ as possible when they do not even own the hardware they BOINC on. Oh yeah look into user " Deltik " too i have a list of his systems before he hid them... But who am I to help , I am shunned.

Had you been bothered to follow my link you would have seen that dutch's post went more in depth which is why I didn't. As I wrote. And this also has nothing to do with ODLK vs ODLK1, whatever that beef is.

I find Pluto being demoted a very good example of revising topics at hand. If the topics do not fit the rules then rule the topics out. Either that or vote Bitcoin Utopia in as it has an actual purpose and solves an actual problem.