How to see what my Islands are doing

[PCZ]

I am running my Islands in windows as a service.

How can I tell what progress they are making ?

No files appear to be written to the local hard drive.
I know they are doing something because the service is running at 99% CPU.

[michaelgarvie]

Hi PCZ,
Welcome back! I'll refer you to http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dhe/faq.php#ntgui for this question. However in the current run the GUI is missing. It will be back when the server is restarted next. No files are ever written to hard drive , this is part of the high security / not intruding with user's PC policy at DHEP.

You can also check your stats http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dhe/statsRankings.php and there will be more coming soon, such as individual and team effort rates.

[michaelgarvie]

Server restarted with GUI, new webserver to provide classes and a 0.5 migration probability at each interaction.

[willy1]

I have some more questions about the non-service Windows GUI client (running by starting IslandNT.bat ).

I had my island running since yesterday evening - there was a GUI window open with all the unintelligable graphics stuff, and a dos box that seemed to be doing the actual computations. There were quite a few generations completed already (7000+ - not sure exactly). I closed the GUI window, thinking that the work would keep on going in the dos box, and the Gui could be reopened to check on the island. However, the action in the dos box stopped, and when I restarted islandNT.bat, it appeared to start over at generation 1.

Is this bad? Looking at the posts above it appears that nothing is written to the PC disk - is all the work lost when the GUI is closed? Is there is no way to save the current island status if the PC has to be rebooted? Also, after restarting, my 'color' went from dark green to light green in the topology chart - isn't darker better? Why would the island get worse unless it had to start over?

Also, in the GUI window, there are 4 sections - the left section I thought was supposed to show neighboring islands, but mine persists in remaining just grey.

While I'm asking - my position on the topology chart is way down in one corner at -8, -8 and I seem to recall the last couple of time I ran this project, I always ended up on the bottom row of the chart, with fewer neighbors. Is this planned somehow, or just the luck of the draw? Maybe I need to be running the client when a new circuit is started to get a 'better' position.

Also, what about neighbors that don't appear to be doing anything? Do those island positions get reassigned after a certain interval of no activity?

Enough questions - sorry for all this - just trying to understand better.


willy1
Free-DC

[michaelgarvie]

Is this bad? Looking at the posts above it appears that nothing is written to the PC disk

Nothing is ever written to your hard disk. It's written to the server hard disk.


is all the work lost when the GUI is closed?

Nothing changes by closing GUI, only thing is you can't get it back without restart client.


Is there is no way to save the current island status if the PC has to be rebooted?
Also, after restarting, my 'color' went from dark green to light green in the topology chart - isn't darker better? Why would the island get worse unless it had to start over?

The server saves your population to hard disk every N generations, N=1000 for this run for eg. If you stop your client at generation 1900 you will restart from 1000 next time you connect. However this does not mean that work was wasted because:
1) A fit individual from your island will probably have migrated to a neighbour.
2) You may have been searching all that time on a neutral landscape and are theoretically in the same position as at Gen 1000. Still that work was useful because in that time you could have found a fitter individual in the landscape which could have migrated to another isalnd.


Also, in the GUI window, there are 4 sections - the left section I thought was supposed to show neighboring islands, but mine persists in remaining just grey.

Try resizing the split panes.


While I'm asking - my position on the topology chart is way down in one corner at -8, -8 and I seem to recall the last couple of time I ran this project, I always ended up on the bottom row of the chart, with fewer neighbors. Is this planned somehow, or just the luck of the draw? Maybe I need to be running the client when a new circuit is started to get a 'better' position.

Yes, position is allocated as a spiral. You can see this happening right now I've just started a new run.


Also, what about neighbors that don't appear to be doing anything? Do those island positions get reassigned after a certain interval of no activity?

They may be doing something but only connecting to the server every 30 mins. Or they may have disconnected but there place is saved just in case they reconnect. All positions are realoccated on server restart.


Enough questions - sorry for all this - just trying to understand better.

No problem!

[rathaman]

i was using the gui version last week, and was noticing that my island was always lagging behind the others around me ... this got to the point where i was almost going to stop entirely because i felt that i wasn't contibuting anything. On a whim i installed as a service, and immediately (1-2 hours) i had caught up to neighbours levels. Is there something different between the code used in the two versions. Maybe this was just a fluke, i don't know.

Other than that issue, this project is fun. Lots of stats and diagrams that i dont' really understand, but its cool to watch it evolve.

[willy1]

More questions:

How can I equate anything seen on the GUI screen to the stats ? I can't find any reference to 'circuits completed' on my client screen - only generations. There are no log files of work sent to the server...

I'm trying to figure out how the same machine could do 33700 circuits on one day and 15000 the next. Nothing else running to suck cycles.

ever puzzled ...

willy1
Free-DC

[michaelgarvie]

generations * population size = circuits.

GUI has nothing to do with speed. Generation rate varies also with the characteristics of your population.

You can find many emails in the thread called "is there server down again??" about how you're not wasting procesing power if your population is not as good as others. You are actually contributing and an important piece (or schema) of the solution may have come from your island.