Folding Forum

I have only been folding for a week or so but I have a few questions that came up in my mind that I was wondering if someone can answer.

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1. For the cell phone application, why has it not changed from Breast Cancer and Her2 Kinase?

A few people that I conned into installing the app are also only seeing the same item for days on end.

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2. For the PC application, I noticed that some projects are repeated multiple times, is that normal?

I am assuming the reason for this is because WU doesn't mean = completed project. Though I could be wrong.

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3. For both the PC application and the Cellphone application, can you guys add a percentage till the total project is completed?

I would like to focus on just one project and work it till completion rather then jump to different ones, but it would also be nice to see how far from total completion it actually is.

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4. Lastly I have a cynical question about folding@home in general, is folding@home a front for mining crypto currency?

For instance maybe a fraction actually goes to doing what you guys say, but then the rest of it is some guys that use all the processing power to mine coins. Is there a way for you guys to check to make sure that doesn't happen and provide us proof to ease my distrust?

Please don't respond with were Standford and were above such petty things, people are still people no matter what institution they are from.

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Thank you for taking the time to read and/or answer my post.

1. I don't know, we don't support mobile application here. Check with Sony ...

2. Yes it normal. For a given project, there are many WUs to process. A WU is identified with a combination of project / run / clone / gen numbers.

3. This kind of suggestion belongs to Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/foldingathome/ ... on this forum, we only provide technical support to donors.
Also you can't choose the project you'll get, this is a complex process handled by assignment servers that will send you what need to be done according to your hardware and preferences.

4. Definitely not. But some crypto currencies will reward you for folding in their teams ... we don't support this here.

Quick reply to Q4. F@H predates any crypto by 9 years. End of.

Also regarding Q4:
I would encourage you to read the science pages at folding.stanford.edu such as http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-diseases/ and follow the "papers" link at the bottome of that page. Scientifc research is judged by the number and quality of research papers published, and FAH has done very well in that regard. You're welcome to compare this with papers published by Crypto sites and decide which you want to be a part of.

And remember, the principles of science encourage skepticism, so questions like Q4 are actually encouraged and we want you to become as informed as possible and to make your own decisions about whether to contribute to FAH or not.

I am going to take a big overview answer to Q1. If you were a researcher trying to 'solve' how a Protein folds, you would have 3 current choices. You could pin your hopes on a Nvidia or AMD GPU core, there are very few GPUs working on F@H, but they are massively powerful. Each GPU is getting a great deal of work done, but there are very few of them and they draw a great deal of power when folding.

Another strategy would be to use Intel CPU running Windows, Linux, or OSX. They are individually weak but there are a lot of them available, many of which are folding. This was a great idea back when Intel CPUs used as much power idling as they did working. Now a days Folding on your CPU really adds to your power cost of owning a PC.

Sony had in the past written a version for the PS3, now retired. With this expertise they ported a version of F@H to Android phones that resemble the Sony Xperia phone. In theory, these devices, while individually very weak, would have the vast numbers to produce useful work. (as you have noticed, they are still on the first projects) Unless a great many folks decide to fold on their device, this strategy is the slowest. Power is somewhat a different issue for Android, you need to have the device plugged in and fully charged, and some devices will throttle back not to overheat.

My big overview of Question 2: Each protein being researched takes a lot of computing power to solve so is divided up into 1000s of slices, worse from the researcher's point of view, until all of the early sections get returned, none of the later sections can start. So they will need to choose between a short time limit which gets the most work returned quickly, but many sections will time out; and a longer time limit that allows more work to be done by 'weaker' devices but it will be longer before they can issue more sections to be analyzed. There are no 'right' answers to this and it is frustrating for both the researchers and for donors.

On question 3, Sony would support the Android app, and there is a reddit site for discussions with the GPU and CPU developer. This site is ideally for support, although real life is never ideal.

Again a big overview answer for Question 4 is that Folding@Home predates Crypto currencies by a decade, so if it were all a 'Evil Plan" the evil plotters had a LONG term plan! In fact they were biochemists who could not afford time on a super computer and decided they could 'trick' us into emulating a super computer for free. We pay the power bill instead of them! Your suspicion does explain why F@H only allows the approved clients even though it is open source. If everyone could write their own client, we would have to trust multiple authors.

I do not know what promotes the suspicion that distributed computing projects are secretly mining coins instead of trying to cure some of the most common diseases like Cancer and Alzheimer's. Seems rather antithetical to me. But if anyone knows where this concern comes from, please let us know so we can end it once and or all.

Hi,

Thank you for answering my questions.

I have continued to fold during this time and have almost reached 900,000 points. (not 100% sure but what they mean, but I have them.)

As for the question 7im asked about where question number 4 comes from. It came from a random thought I had since so many fake charities are out there that just lie to people that actually want to help.

Humans are competitive, Points just allow you to measure your contribution and to 'race' other contributors for your amusement. They have no value and, especially with Quick Return Bonuses, it is not clear they all represent the same amount of science being done. (although F@H tries)

JimboPalmer wrote:... and, especially with Quick Return Bonuses, it is not clear they all represent the same amount of science being done. (although F@H tries)

An important fact about FAH: The scientific objective is to compute trajectories (the "path" involving the motions of all the atoms from one set of positions to the positions at a later time). Each trajectory is made up of many WUs computed SERIALLY so long trajectories necessarily take more calendar time to run because only one person can work on it at a time.)

Suppose the FAH community computes 1000 short trajectories and nothing significant happens in any of them. Now suppose the FAH community computes 10 trajectories that are 100 times as long and something very significant happens in one or two of them. Which is more valuable?

If each short trajectory takes a month to complete with average donor hardware, the long trajectories will take 8+ years (100 months) to complete with the same hardware. How much bonus should be awarded to those who contribute faster hardware if each step in the 8 year project can be shortened significantly?

7im wrote:I do not know what promotes the suspicion that distributed computing projects are secretly mining coins instead of trying to cure some of the most common diseases like Cancer and Alzheimer's. Seems rather antithetical to me. But if anyone knows where this concern comes from, please let us know so we can end it once and or all.

I had my own concerns in the early days when started folding. At that time I just didn't understood what is a core and what is a WU. And if bad or malicious code could be embeddd in one of both; just downloaded in the background by the software stack including my system in a hidden bot net (mining coins, cracking passwords, ...). That was also one of the reasons why I started folding in an isolated virtual machine. Paranoid ? Maybe a bit.

To be clear: I overcome my concerns/worries and trust the environment and PG. That trust is build over the few years of active participation, learning through communication via the different channels with various members of PG and FF.

If there could be any kind of regular independent 3rd party security audit/certification it might could remove initial concerns of new joiners much faster and reduce a perceived risk. My 2¥.

wilding2004 wrote:Quick reply to Q4. F@H predates any crypto by 9 years. End of.

JimboPalmer wrote:...
Again a big overview answer for Question 4 is that Folding@Home predates Crypto currencies by a decade, so if it were all a 'Evil Plan" the evil plotters had a LONG term plan! ....

Actually, no, there are/were several pre-y2k cryptos (albeit that most, if not all, are dead now); however, it does predate the "average" person knowing about cryptos (most still only know of BTC) by that much.

ComputerGenie wrote:

wilding2004 wrote:Quick reply to Q4. F@H predates any crypto by 9 years. End of.

JimboPalmer wrote:...
Again a big overview answer for Question 4 is that Folding@Home predates Crypto currencies by a decade, so if it were all a 'Evil Plan" the evil plotters had a LONG term plan! ....

Actually, no, there are/were several pre-y2k cryptos (albeit that most, if not all, are dead now); however, it does predate the "average" person knowing about cryptos (most still only know of BTC) by that much.

Well, I might be wrong as it's not really an area i'm that interested in - but I believe what your thinking of are part of a larger group known as digital currency. These have been around since the mid 90's in various forms. Specifically though, cryptocurrency is a newer form of digital currency, and I suppose it should be made clearer that the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 was the first decentralised crypto.

wilding2004 wrote:
Well, I might be wrong as it's not really an area i'm that interested in - but I believe what your thinking of are part of a larger group known as digital currency. These have been around since the mid 90's in various forms. Specifically though, cryptocurrency is a newer form of digital currency, and I suppose it should be made clearer that the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 was the first decentralised crypto.

Bitcoin being decentralized has no relevance to the fact that there were cryptos pre-y2k.
"Bitcoin...blablabla....Bitcoin" is the same as "No other news outlet existed before FOXNews"

Anyway, I digress....

ComputerGenie wrote:

wilding2004 wrote:
Well, I might be wrong as it's not really an area i'm that interested in - but I believe what your thinking of are part of a larger group known as digital currency. These have been around since the mid 90's in various forms. Specifically though, cryptocurrency is a newer form of digital currency, and I suppose it should be made clearer that the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 was the first decentralised crypto.

Bitcoin being decentralized has no relevance to the fact that there were cryptos pre-y2k.
"Bitcoin...blablabla....Bitcoin" is the same as "No other news outlet existed before FOXNews"

Anyway, I digress....

Could you give me a example of a pre y2k crypto? I'm just interested to know, as I didn't think any of the early digital currencies were based on cryptography

wilding2004 wrote: Could you give me a example of a pre y2k crypto? I'm just interested to know, as I didn't think any of the early digital currencies were based on cryptography

Off the top of my head, Bit Gold (not to be confused with Bitgold) was ~1998, but Chaum had written the witepaper for "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" as far back as '81 (some suggest that some private entities did, in fact, use small-scale, albeit short lived, "cryptosystems" [as Chaum called them] based on his work).

A thing need not be generally accepted or widely known to be a thing.