Erratic stats ?

[willy1]

Is it normal (?) to keep appearing and disappearing from the stats on the DHEP site?

I checked about 10 minutes ago, and was not listed on the Free-DC team page, but refreshed just now and appeared again...

Very puzzling.

Also, whilst I'm about this, is there a method to tell, apart from the site stats, what is happening with one's model (island?) ? I tried to use the windows java GUI thing but it appeared to want to start a new work unit, not show the status of the work unit that had been running for a few days.

Thanks

willy1

[PCZ]

willy 1

Have you got more than one machine running the client ?
If so are the names unique ?

This can happen if you more than one instance running with the same node name
and different spellings of the team name.

[willy1]

It has only been installed on one machine so far.

It's a Windows 2000 Pro machine, and the first install was apparently the service variety.

As I said above, I tried to used the GUI to see the status of the current work unit, but it apparently tried to start a different work unit (?) but the information in island.bat was the same as that given during the initial setup. but now that I look at it, the GUI island.bat does not have a place for team name. Perhaps this caused the issue? Edit: It seems every time I start the GUI to check the work status, I disappear from the stats. :confused:

How does the GUI interact with the service? The FAQ suggests that the GUI will show you the current state of your work.

Are there any data files stored on the local PC? The GUI is in a separate folder from the first client (the instructions seemed to suggest this) but there does not seem to be any new files genereated in this folder, such as progress files or log files.


This is a very confusing DC client. :trash:


willy1

[ECL]

Willy1,

The team name is specified at the end of the "start" line in your bat file. Mine looks like:

start /low /b /wait java -Djava.security.policy=java.policy -jar ITClient.jar 139.184.166.27 KingKong <your machine> -i 30 -c 60 <your email> Free-DC

Obviously, yours would have your machine name and email address.

The Java gui conveys no useful information whatsoever and can be safely avoided. The only way to find out what's really happening is to watch the team stats page on the DHEP site.

The client doesn't write anything to disk, it just downloads work and keeps it in memory. No logging.

This project is basically all rough edges. It's hard to see what the software is doing, the stats reporting is underwhelming, and the project site is straight out of 1995.

On the up side, the client is stable, and if you leave it running long enough it seems to run up a lot of points.

[willy1]

Originally posted by ECL
Willy1,

The team name is specified at the end of the "start" line in your bat file. Mine looks like:

start /low /b /wait java -Djava.security.policy=java.policy -jar ITClient.jar 139.184.166.27 KingKong <your machine> -i 30 -c 60 <your email> Free-DC

Obviously, yours would have your machine name and email address.


That information is not in the site FAQ anywhere that I can find. Thnnks for bringing some light to the subject. I will modify the island.bat as above and see what transpires. I take it that the GUI and service are mutually exclusive and I should only be running one or the other?

However - it raises another question. The <your machine> value - this implies that this is machine specific? Is this not the user id <willy1> for any machine it's installed on?



The Java gui conveys no useful information whatsoever and can be safely avoided. The only way to find out what's really happening is to watch the team stats page on the DHEP site.

Again, this is totally misleading on the site FAQ. I cannot find anything on the statistics page that shows anything about my work other than a point value - no description of what type of circuit is currently being worked on, nothing about these neighboring 'islands' . What exactly is an 'island' in the context of this project? There seems to be a lot more information available to some users about what this project is doing than is generally available, such as in this thread (http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4518). Where is this type of information coming from? Powerful/weak neighbors? Genetic sharing? Migration?


willy1

[ECL]

Each computer hosts one "island", which you should give a unique name and specify as the machine name. On my dual-CPU machine "Odin" I have two processes in different subdirectories, which is why the stats show "ECL_Odin" and "ECL_Odin2". I suspect that having two islands with identical names will result in bad things happening. Riots and floods, most likely. I suspect the DHEP server would simply reflect the most recent result submitted, so that two islands would alternately replace each other's data.

There isn't any way to see what kind of circuit is bing processed. There's the stuff that gets printed when you start up, but I doubt it makes sense to anyone but the guy who wrote the code. The only marginally useful thing I've seen as the client crunches is that the generation number goes up. This and paint drying are about equal on the "Exciting things to watch" scale. It would be nice to see how many points each packet generated, or how the packet rated in fitness, but this doesn't seem to be in the cards.

My understanding of the theory is that each island processes cicuits, and in some way islands cross-pollinate somehow so that less-powerful circuits are selected for extinction. The Java gui purports to tell you which islands are adjacent to your own, but this doesn't really help me much. I'm pretty much in the dark here. Prokaryote is the local expert on genetic algorithms and has put more thought into how this project works and why.