March Madness -- Sign-up Thread

[David]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Overclockers.com Folding@Home Team,

You are cordially invited to participate in March Madness 2011.


Introduction

It's that time of year - except, this time it's in March - again! We're still sorting out this years prizes, but we hope to make this year the best yet.


Rules

The rules are aimed at allowing power folders and casual folders alike to earn raffle entries.

• Each ten thousand (10,000) points earns you a raffle entry into the draw for the prizes.
• Each ten work-units earns you a raffle entry into the draw.

Thus:

• One hundred "classic" WUs at 112 points each would earn you 1 entry for points and 10 for WUs.
• Ten "bidgadv" WUs at, say, 50,000 points each would earn you 50 entries for points and 1 entry for work units.

This system means that power folders with i7 machines will rack up the points faster, but people folding smaller work units or with hardware a generation or two behind are not left out.

We also hope to sort out prizes for some sub-contests that don't involve pure muscle, but this will depend on the nature of the prize bag.

All rules, prizes, administration, etc. are at my discretion. My word on any aspect of the contest is final.


Prizes

To be confirmed.


Important Dates

• 22nd Feb: Registration opens.
• 6th March: All prizes/rules/etc. will be confirmed. Registration closes.
• 14th March: Competition starts!
• 11th April: Competition closed.
• 18th April: Winners announced!

Want in?

To enter, you must post the following information:

• Your first name.
• Your OCF handle.
• Your Folding@Home handle.

Questions

Got a question? Post in the thread or send me a PM and I'll post the question and the answer here.

 

[David]

Feel free to chip in with any thoughts.

 

[ozzlo]

First name sounds pretty rough...
Maybe i've gotten paranoid over the years after my work figured out my completely anonymous blog and started reading all my gripes about my work.

I wonder how well the points & WU's thing scales for GPU's... GPU's put out good PPD and Lots of WU's...
I don't really have the means to do the math to figure out how GPU's stack up to the other clients...

When I ran my 2 month long contest (full of both great success and great failure) I did not do anything to even out the odds of winning for the people that did not produce as much. But what I did do was for the winners of the random drawings, their odds of winning a second prize was cut by 1/4 allowing other people to have a greater chance to win a prize... this only worked out because a prize was drawn (almost) weekly. Also, some of the top producers declined their prizes allowing a new winner to be drawn the next week. I do not recommend running the contest this way as the amount of work to run a contest this was is substantial.

I think going off of both points and workunits might be a little bit confusing. The rosie contests have been run with some great success going off contributor's PPD in order to progressively determine how quickly you earn work units...

how about something like this

0-1,000 average contest PPD = 1 entry per day
1,000-5,000 average contest PPD = 2 entries per day
5,000-10,000 average contest PPD = 3 entries per day
10,000-20,000 average contest PPD = 4 entries per day
20,000-50,000 average contest PPD = 5 entries per day
50,000-100,000 average contest PPD = 7 entries per day
100,000+ average contest PPD = 10 entries per day

Total entries for contest calculated like this

number of entries per day (determined by PPD) x number of days workunits were produced during the contest.

for example... I produce an average of 14,000 PPD with a single GTX 470 GPU over the entire contest duration (28 days)

4 entries / day X 28 days = 112 entries earned for the entire contest.

 

[ozzlo]

I just realized the rosetta team went ahead with their march contest... I know a few rosetta members that may want to participate but can't because they have their own contest to participate in.

 

[David]

Crap, we're going to need to postpone it. April Fools Madness?

I don't want to steal any steam from the R@H team - they're good at coming through for us.

 

[ozzlo]

What do you guys think of changing the contest to a simple 2-week "all-in" bash? The main reasoning for shorting the contest to 2 weeks is so that we don't overlap the Rosetta contest already in progress and so that we have some time to adjust for the chimp challenge in may.

I am thinking of the following timeline...

April 4th... Signups begin
April 11th...... Contest begins
April 25th.... Contest ends
May 5th Chimp Challenge Begins

 

[splat]

the rosetta contest is a gradual, ongoing thing. of course you don't want to step on toes but i tried to get him to set a specific end date and he said he likes leaving it open and doing a small prize every week or two. SO, i wouldn't bee too worried about overlap as long as you have a specific start and end date and it doesn't run for months at a time.