I think Stardust@home made a mistake in the 'cheater' thing.

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alexz
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:43 pm

I think Stardust@home made a mistake in the 'cheater' thing.

Post by alexz »

I'm not one of the people who had the accounts zero'd out, but I think the difference in the 'cheater' and regular user histograms can be explained by the large number of 'bad focus' movies recently. It takes hardly any time to realize that the focus of the bad focus movies is above the surface.


I also don't think that being faster makes people worse.
The human eye is a very high resolution sensor, and the human brain is good at 'finding' things. We do something as complicated as walking without thinking about it consciously, but it's a task that requires avoiding collisions with everyone else in the crowd as well as not tripping over items on the floor; so the "you have to stare at something for a long time to do a good job" argument is silly.

In summary: I think the math and the logic involved in the histograms that called people 'cheaters' is flawed.
BarrieT
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Aug 17, 2006 10:09 pm

Post by BarrieT »

Movies you mark as "Bad Focus" are not counted as real movies viewed, so I don't think they will have any effect on the anti-cheating measures.
MDG
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun May 28, 2006 8:01 am
Location: South Africa

Post by MDG »

Hi Alexz,

I've been watching the whole "cheater" debate with interest. After reading Gaels' posts yesterday, while I don't know if there was cheating or not, it was very clear that Gael wasn't checking the movies properly. It's impossible to just click through the movies and dismiss them without allowing it time to load properly and then focus all the way down to find some of those tiny, elusive tracks, or perhaps something that might be interesting to the stardust team. Also, it seemed to me that when the project launched, there were one or two people who were more interested in showing off their high scores than being interested in the science.

The stardust team said, that we should expect the unexpected, no-one is sure what we'll find - clicking "willy nilly" through the movies isn't helping the team at all, it will probably waste their time having to go through all the movies again. Heck, then we would have wasted our time too because then they wouldn't have needed us to do this.
I think they have a very difficult job, there are only 6 of them, and people who think this is a game to outscore each other just makes it all the more difficult.
.
I'm quite happy to check the movies at my leisure and save the interesting ones as souveniers. I've just checked my 902 real movie and I'm still at 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity - I like being thorough and making sure that what I click is interesting enough for the team to look at.

I have no complaints about the team at all, if I have a problem I check the forum for the answers. I think they're doing the best they can

Anyway thet's my opinion - and no, I don't work at Berkley or know anyone there.

Great work stardust team! :D
Regards
Michelle
"We are Stardust, we are golden........." Joni Mitchell
DustBuster
DustMod
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Post by DustBuster »

MOVED to Community Forum. Please continue this discussion here.
No dessert for you- ONE MONTH!
BarrieT
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Aug 17, 2006 10:09 pm

Post by BarrieT »

BarrieT wrote:Movies you mark as "Bad Focus" are not counted as real movies viewed, so I don't think they will have any effect on the anti-cheating measures.
Oops, sorry! Given the recent update by Andrew Westphal, it appears that this should have been true, but wasn't!
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