bcavnaugh
Even with The East and Central having more Players they also have MORE STATES.
This really needs to be re-looked at. Number of States are Highest in the East then the Central then Mountain and then last Pacific.
Poor Pacific they only have 4 and a half States. How was the TZC ever a Fair Challenge?

 
Pacific and Mountain Together Would be Far to Central and the East.
Three Teams not Four Teams would be a Legitimate Challenge.
 
Only my 2 and a Half Cents.

 
Mountain will always have the fewest people - mostly prairie or mountain area
lots of land -mostly farmland or mountain - so very few people on it
 
AB(Can) SK(Can) - prairie
MT prairie
ID - mountain
WY - prairie
UT -mountain
CO -mountain- prairie
AZ -desert
NM desert
 
I think California (a single state) has more pop than all the Mountain zone
and BC(Can) has more pop than AB(Can),SK(Can)
 
the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)
 
East coast was settled first - most of the industrial base of US is there
so most of the population is there - most of the trade is Atlantic trade ... Europe for longest time
as people moved inland central would be next largest occupied space
so from prairie to west coast has low population - and most would settle on the opposite coast
some due to the Gold rush
 
why would you want to live in a desert when you can have nice sunny beaches
 
Anyway I digress....
 
the contest was never ever Fair...OK I can live with that
then leave the weaker zones some chance of some upset - ie the assignment of those outside the zones to the weaker ones
because seeing it EST,CST,MST,PST.....well next year it should be EST,CST,PST,MST  
year after year is pointless
 
 
 
id be happy with PST winning it once - if they could afford to run the rigs
 
Mountain will be in dead last soon with the 4p's going going to the wayside - we just don't have the members to compete against a larger force folding on gpus
I can see us being in dead last next time
 
so we have gpu farms ? (what a dozen members with farms) - well that gets balanced out by everyone on your teams folding on GPUS too
---------
 
so what the alternative???
foldathon?
Zonal challenge (place states/provinces together in a ways that matches them up population wise)? - this gets complicated
XMAS games?...don't let Rudolph play any reindeer ones
 
 
 
 

CENTRAL, turn on EVERYTHING that you have left. Don't hold back!!!
 
I can't add anymore, out of PCIe slots. I already have an i7-930, i7-2600k, GTX660Ti, GTX660 and 2x GTX560Ti folding for our last battle day.

Xavier Zepherious

bcavnaugh
Even with The East and Central having more Players they also have MORE STATES.
This really needs to be re-looked at. Number of States are Highest in the East then the Central then Mountain and then last Pacific.
Poor Pacific they only have 4 and a half States. How was the TZC ever a Fair Challenge?

 
Pacific and Mountain Together Would be Far to Central and the East.
Three Teams not Four Teams would be a Legitimate Challenge.
 
Only my 2 and a Half Cents.

 
Mountain will always have the fewest people - mostly prairie or mountain area
lots of land -mostly farmland or mountain - so very few people on it
 
AB(Can) SK(Can) - prairie
MT prairie
ID - mountain
WY - prairie
UT -mountain
CO -mountain- prairie
AZ -desert
NM desert
 
I think California (a single state) has more pop than all the Mountain zone
and BC(Can) has more pop than AB(Can),SK(Can)
 
the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)
 
East coast was settled first - most of the industrial base of US is there
so most of the population is there - most of the trade is Atlantic trade ... Europe for longest time
as people moved inland central would be next largest occupied space
so from prairie to west coast has low population - and most would settle on the opposite coast
some due to the Gold rush
 
why would you want to live in a desert when you can have nice sunny beaches
 
Anyway I digress....
 
the contest was never ever Fair...OK I can live with that
then leave the weaker zones some chance of some upset - ie the assignment of those outside the zones to the weaker ones
because seeing it EST,CST,MST,PST.....well next year it should be EST,CST,PST,MST  
year after year is pointless
 
 
 
id be happy with PST winning it once - if they could afford to run the rigs
 
Mountain will be in dead last soon with the 4p's going going to the wayside - we just don't have the members to compete against a larger force folding on gpus
I can see us being in dead last next time
 
so we have gpu farms ? (what a dozen members with farms) - well that gets balanced out by everyone on your teams folding on GPUS too
---------
 
so what the alternative???
foldathon?
Zonal challenge (place states/provinces together in a ways that matches them up population wise)? - this gets complicated
XMAS games?...don't let Rudolph play any reindeer ones
 
 
 
 

 
Sort of what I was thinking: Possibly balancing it out by population density. (However, that still doesn't address the cost-of-electricity matter. Though I can't logically think of a way to mitigate that one. ... Send your GPUs to a folder in an area with lesser $/kilowatt?? - but then that would get tricky, and possibly ugly, what with figuring out costs due to the owner of the donor box, and the possibility of someone not being honest enough to return your GPU(s).)

Colorado under Xcel Energy and 3 Tier cost is VERY High Winter for me is just under $500 and $1200 in the Summer.
My Estimate for this TZC will be about $600. 

Xavier Zepherious
"the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)"

 
Nuke Plants should be free.
 
Also Once Core 15 Tasks Stop this will cut cost almost in Half.

bill1024
Do a North vs South, never mind, was done already.

Maybe, but at the time no one had to pay for electricity

Punchy,
My plan was only to Fold around 300,000 PPD for this contest but because we had such a low number of Team Members for Mountain I Fired Up All My Rigs to help off set the low count. It cost way to much now for me now that I am not working.
Next Time The TZC Runs most likely we will not have BigAdv to run so all we will have are GPU and for the most part Cost the Most to Fold. So the TZC would run two to three times longer *even for the East to hit 100 Million Points.
Maybe within the Team we could match GPU Model to GPU Model and maybe even CPU like Intel -v- AMD.
For the most part I will continue to play but at a much lower cost to time for the completion.

BadBertie
Agree with Punchy there. While I have found this tzc entertaining and amusing, as a race/competition it was over from day one. To try and balance teams, handicaps or whatever, you are trying to artificially make the teams identical in performance. And where's the fun in that.
The entertainment in this tzc for me has been the freedom/possibility for Mountain and Central to up their game and it may still be a very close finish tomorrow.
Where you have teams of a complete mix of ppd, limited by expense effectively, you need to devise a contest of skill rather than brute force. The only example I could think of is daft but goes like: random number generates a total 24hr points production for each of the teams to achieve but not exceed. Teams or team captains nominate the "players" for each day's target production score. Closest to the total wins a point, over shooting deducts points. To allow for continuous play for a couple of weeks, the 14 daily random numbers are all announced on day 1 to allow teamwork and planning. It would be a pain to administer but largely removes the advantage of the big guns.

Any contest where it is advantageous to limit production is counterproductive to one the primary goals of contests.

troy8d

BadBertie
Agree with Punchy there. While I have found this tzc entertaining and amusing, as a race/competition it was over from day one. To try and balance teams, handicaps or whatever, you are trying to artificially make the teams identical in performance. And where's the fun in that.
The entertainment in this tzc for me has been the freedom/possibility for Mountain and Central to up their game and it may still be a very close finish tomorrow.
Where you have teams of a complete mix of ppd, limited by expense effectively, you need to devise a contest of skill rather than brute force. The only example I could think of is daft but goes like: random number generates a total 24hr points production for each of the teams to achieve but not exceed. Teams or team captains nominate the "players" for each day's target production score. Closest to the total wins a point, over shooting deducts points. To allow for continuous play for a couple of weeks, the 14 daily random numbers are all announced on day 1 to allow teamwork and planning. It would be a pain to administer but largely removes the advantage of the big guns.

Any contest where it is advantageous to limit production is counterproductive to one the primary goals of contests.

Maybe we need to  Re-Post the "primary goals of contests"
For the most part I thought it was In Team competition.
Whether we Fold as a single user within our team or in a competition then end is still Folding.  

Punchy
I think texinga was on to something, that it's not total population but population of folders in a given geography.  However, I'd go a step further and say it's not just the population of folders but also the distribution of production of those folders.  For example, if a "time zone" contained only brilong at 16 million PPD alone, it doesn't really matter how many other folders are in that time zone.
 
There are really only 2 possibilities here: either an unbalanced competition based on some attribute of each person (whether it's time zone, latitude, longitude, birthday, last digit of phone number or postal code, etc), or a "balanced" competition that again groups people by some attribute but then attempts to balance things somehow.
 
The current TZC is a hybrid of the 2: there weren't enough non-North-American folders to balance out EST, so it was a given that EST would stand alone and win.  The "extras" were allocated between Pacific and Mountain to at least balance those out.  However, this competition has been the most dramatic demonstration ever of how "balancing" fails.  Balancing only works if people are accurate with their production estimates.  Hence the registration rule:

• All information must be reported as accurately as possible during registration.

When the information isn't accurate, balancing won't work.  In previous competitions we have put caps on production for "overachievers", but even that won't really work, because then the winning team is the one where the most members come closest to the cap (thus rewarding the team with the most sandbaggers).
 
I think we should abandon the notion of balanced competitions for good, and come up with some other way of assigning people that gives us a reasonably even distribution and "let the chips fall where they may" as texinga said, or come up with some other way of picking a winner.

 
I totally agree with the accuracy problem
we had people that posted too low and some posted way to high (Which left teammates scrambling to make up deficits)
and you have the few that might post PPD numbers intentionally low
 
I posted 50-70k PPD myself - would have been happy to do that and still game
but when teammates can't deliver - hardware fails - ooops someone posted too high a PPD ...now we have to make the shortfall...i sacrificed my having my stress relief activity...
Im going back to that after midnight tonight (because we should be over 100M and any Wu would be way after we are over the line)
 
Im not stopping ..just going back to a regular take it easy and game mode
 
 
why not quit the Lets fill in how much we can deliver and - go by your PPD avg during your best month(s) 
(do not include bad months - because people may not fold some months)
 

I am very busy these days, but I'll leave my $.02.  I have always felt the TZC is an inherently unbalanced contest.  For those of you who don't know, it originated with Zerran2001 and for the first 2 years Central won, the next two years Eastern won and it looks like that hasn't changed this year.  Unfortunately, ETZ has the highest population density and when I raised the participation of the contest it increased the sample size of folders we were drawing from and magnified that difference.  Yet, it always seemed that people were fond of the TZC and it held a certain charm among members of this team so that despite is inherent design flaws and as such I felt it worthwhile to continue. 
 
It was fully my intention to do two things to make this contest more balanced/interesting, but I simply did not have the time with a crazy busy schedule this semester. 

• I would like to see the results of the competition when it is weighted by population (excluding the additional points of the international participants) - I ran some rough estimates of this a year or two ago and found it makes the race much more interesting. Think of it along the lines of a points per capita competition in each time zone and the team that would win would be the one that was able to turn out a larger portion of its folders (assuming a uniform distribution of folders across population).
• We also were going to have mega teams competition - I think this year ETZ + International vs CTZ, MTZ, and PTZ would have made a very close race.

 
I certainly regret that I am not able to devote more time to folding at the moment (I haven't even been able to get my own folding setup up and running).  I am also a bit disappointed with my contribution to this year's TZC.  Contests take an tremendous amount of planning, time and effort to run and given my schedule I haven't been able to devote the necessary time to make it what I would like to be (we weren't even able to make our original November deadline).

A big thank you to those who participated in this years contest, those who donated prizes, and those who helped to make it happen.  Drougnor holdin down the stats as always, Saijnor helpin to keep things organized here on the forums, Dutchforce helpin on the forums and contest design, and notfordman doing a little bit of everything.
 
Happy folding to all,
And to all a goodnight!

I was fairly close to my ppd estimate, but mildly depressed when I sprung a blue leak last night and had to scramble to plug said leak so I wasn't dragging the team down on the home stretch. There was blue coolant all over my dresser and dresser top, lol. I lost over a quart or coolant total. Sheer panic mode.

I know Mt. would not win but that did not stop me from,Firing up every thing I have well all most could of added 2 or 4 more older gpu's. I did not fire them up to win I did it because its fun doing contests here.Lol my 16 core 4p's just set there getting dusty cost way to much to run them but I do run them for contests.
I stopped updating my GPU's after the bigadv thing happened and now mostly buck fold.Really hard to tell what your PPD will be by only folding on 1/4 th of what you can fold on a week or two a month.
I like the TZC the way it is and next year could be even more fun with the big 6o core servers only getting smp's
Well It will have been 3 years on the same computer think the cpu and motherboard will be good for 3 more can not see going from 12 cores to 16 BUT.I all ways have wanted to put 4 GPU's in there its built for it.<<<< wishing I picked up a money pit called a boat on top of my hot rod project not much left for any thing else

on a lighter side ...it's nice seeing a 
"2014 TZC Team Display"
 
and the graph says 2011 Time Zone Challenge 
 
hey are we using stats from 3 years ago....LOL

BOOOM
Mountain takes #2!
well done team, thanks for adopting me!
I thought our power to weight ratio was awesome

Xavier Zepherious
on a lighter side ...it's nice seeing a 
"2014 TZC Team Display"
 
and the graph says 2011 Time Zone Challenge 
 
hey are we using stats from 3 years ago....LOL

Darn it! You figured out my secret for stability!