Folding Forum

I don't know if it has been suggested before, but would it be possible for the client to "downgrade" by itself, if there are no WU for its current setup?

That's a reasonable request, but I don't think it's possible.

The client makes a specific request of the Assignment Server. It either finds a Work Server that can fulfill that request or it determines that the request cannot be fulfilled. The client's only choices is to wait and retry -- unless you make a change to the settings.

The logic of deciding which of your settings might be changed is very challenging for humans, and writing software that would be more intelligent that that human isn't feasible.

The servers can be configured to exclude ALL requests for CPU:7 (or for whatever setting we happen to be talking about) and a client enhancement could be written that makes it impossible to set CPU:7, but that would apply to everybody so all projects which successfully run with CPU:7 would be forced to run with only 6. That would result in a lot of complaints about "Why FAH isn't using all of my CPUs?" Making enhancements like that would also go at the bottom of the development backlog (and there will always be more critical issues jumping ahead of it).

See also Dr. Pande's vision for future changes to FAH https://folding.stanford.edu/home/2015-achievements/

Bruce: Thanks for the link to Dr. Pande's vision. I've just read it and it's reinforced something I've been thinking more and more over the last year.

His vision is all about the science, the math, the technology. It's good to be thinking about those things. But it's all useless unless you have the donors motivated to commit time, energy and resources to the FAH cause.

My motivation (and I suspect the motivation of many of the FAH donors) dwindles:
- every time I've got to check my stats to find out that something has gone off the rails, sometimes days ago and my machine has been idle
- every time I've got to check the boards to try to figure out what's gone off the rails, is it:
- just a glitch in the stats system?
- malfunctioning assignment or work servers?
- no WU's for my particular configuration?
- bad hardware or software on my machines?
- bad WU's?
- every time my stats http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ ... =&u=114950 take a jump / dive when I've not changed a thing with my hardware or time devoted to FAH

If administrators of the FAH infrastructure don't appear to care enough about the donors, or at minimum provide a way to keep donors proactively informed about what's happing, the goal of getting 1,000,000 is a lofty and unattainable dream.

Perhaps FAH admin could engage behavioural science to help identify the things that will motivate donors to join and engage with FAH.

You are right that

writing software that would be more intelligent that that human isn't feasible.

. But it doesn't take a big leap in programming to come up with a mechanism to notify donors (if they subscribe to it) that something has gone untoward that's affecting their contributions to FAH.

All of my CPUs fold with 4 cores or less and I have not seen these lack of assignments. I suppose the more the computer is in the enthusiast class, the more often you have to monitor it. Mine are all still set and forget. If you want set and forget, run more slots with lower CPU settings.