It has been very quiet in the contest area of the DC forums. Despite this, I thought I would take a shot at gauging interest in some sort of contest/challenge before the folding season is really over. I am completely willing to set up a contest, although my qualities are limited to an abundance of free time and simple web tools. Help would certainly make it better (stats especially), but I could patch something together on my own, if need be. The aim would be for late April or May. I know its already getting warmer for many, but we can still squeeze it in for some.
 
If many are interested, I could put in a survey to see what sort of contest you all would like to do. This can be similar to the Time Zone Challenge, the March Madness style (May Madness?), or something completely new. I would love to hear your ideas and it would be even better if we could include our friends over on the crunching side. Still, it would need to be something generally simple, so we can hit the ground running and get it up and running in short order.
 
With all the changes and uncertainty in points at the moment, (core 15 vs 17) I think it would really add some interesting elements to the mix. Throwing in crunchers could make for a very unique contest as well.
 
Feel free to post your ideas here or PM me if you aren't comfortable with putting it out in public yet. And, of course, if there interest isn't there this year, we can just move on. I would just like to have a little fun this year, even if its a small deal.
 
Fold on, Crunch on, Game on, Sleep on, or whatever you do 

I was thinking more on the lines on an in-house contest. I am thinking it would take more time to set up a cross-team deal, and having under a month to do it in is pretty constricting. That said, if enough people want to do a cross-team competition, and think we can set it up quickly enough, I am game to put it together the best I can. I am very open, I would just like to do something.

Yes, what Bill is talking about is what Folding needs.  A way to have some competitive fun without having to expect all the resources/management to come from a single team member (or several).  Contests need some way to get/report stats or the whole thing loses the measurement that is needed to show progress and motivate people.  Keep the contest short this time of year even through May.  If the PrimeGrid folks tried to run a 15-day contest in April or May, I'd have to bow out (too much heat across too much time).  A 3-5 day contest is better when outdoor temps have already began to rise. 
 
I have no expertise in managing contests like we have had here in the past and having the same people run them for years is also unrealistic (they get tired, burn out or just don't have the time).  Wish I had an easy answer for this and maybe someone will figure it out in the course of this discussion.  I do see/feel the need for the Folding community to have some fun.  As Bill suggested, join us over for some of the Crunching contests if nothing else.  The EVGA Crunching team and Folding teams are really "one" in my belief and we should "play together".

Punchy
I think it would be fun to have a Time Zone Challenge with a new twist - the competition has 3 divisions: folding, crunching (CPU) and crunching (GPU).  I split out CPU and GPU BOINC because some GPU projects like GPUgrid tend to award far higher points than CPU projects like WCG.
 
Each division is scored separately and placed, then your team gets points for their placing in each division, the points are added together, and an overall winner is crowned.
 
Edit: changed "class" to "division"

I very much like this idea of the multiple division TZC. I was thinking of something very similar each time I was thinking about mixing folding and crunching challenges. I wasn't sure of the most effective way of creating divisions as I have done crunching of all of 3 days so far, and only 1 project. I don't know much about crunching and the points in comparison to folding or from one project to another. But Punchy's idea is effective and relatively easy to implement, providing it is easy enough to separate CPU and GPU projects.
 
I understand a long contest is going to be difficult for people with the temperatures as they are. However, the beauty of the TZC is that you don't really need to fold or crunch for the entire period of time. Your input for just one day will help your team out, as there is no throttling or balancing. If we go forward with anything, we will try to balance time for everyone as well as possible. If anything, this may end up being more of a beta run, laying groundwork for a solid run next winter.
 
 

On Punchy's idea, would it be more interesting to run the divisions at 3 different times, or all 3 together? I was thinking together, as it would allow people to choose their strategy. I know it would mean spreading out our collaborative power, but I also know there are some people who don't really want to bother installing and/or learning a new program just for a week or two (be it from folding or from crunching to the other side).
 
Another topic. Where would one find a stats file for crunching? I have started to work on the one on folding to see what I can do on my own.

This might be the perfect time to try the subteams/divisions concept (follow the link & search for subteams) over at free-dc.org.  In theory one EVGA division would be for Folding GPU, one for crunching GPU, and the last for a crunching CPU division.  All points still go under the EVGA umbrella but free-dc handles the division stats for us.  Here's a discription from their FAQ.
 

12. How do Subteam / Divisions work?

If you change your username at enough projects to include a name within square brackets [] like [MegaTeam] then the stats will create that subteam of your main team. This way you can belong to an overall team (and credits go to them) whilst joining together with some close friends to form a mini team. There are a few limitations given this is only processed client side. Rankings are done for subteams both project and teamrank, but if a user joins or leaves the team the credits come or go with them for that subteam/division. There is space for a subteam description. This is much like the team description you would normally setup at a project page in that it will handle bbcode and graphics linked via html. There is currently no mechanism for adding it through, so please feel free to contact Bok in the forums or in any other way and request it - Forum

 
Not entirely sure this would work for F@H since it does require you to change the name in the client.  Ideally the F@H passkey would mitigate this, but most stats sites perform look-ups by name and not passkey.  So this could at least handle the BOINC side of things, since project stats are tied to an email address/CPID and not the user name.  
 
Again, in theory...

From a stats side, I am not sure how we would be able to see the difference between GPU and CPU folding. It is basically just taking a points update every hour. There is nothing indicating what sort of WU was done. And folding has always been dominated by whatever technology is best at the time. While it would be great to give a reason to push SMP folding, I don't think we would be able to easily.
 
In my mind, I am seeing separating crunching by projects, ones that utilize CPU only and then ones that utilize both or GPU only. Someone using only a CPU to crunch a project that can utilize a GPU as well will still be included in the latter category. To make it easy on the stats collector (me, at this point) we should probably make a list of approved projects for each category. This would make it so one would only have to check statistics from those said projects. Maybe somewhere around a dozen projects? It can be more, of course, I just don't want someone to miss points because I didn't collect from a more obscure project.
 
I think we will have to stick to a 3 division race for this time unless someone knows an alternate way to collect stats.

Personally, I like not limiting people to what they signed up under. This would allow people to jump some of their power over to another division to try and bring their team up in that ranking. It creates a little competition and strategy in deciding how to distribute computing power, if they so choose to.
 
Forgot to mention before. I should be able to get a thread and sign-up page going this week, if we iron out the rules and run-time. I was looking at April 20th to April 30th. Shorter than most challenges, but temperature is limiting to people, and I wanted to wrap it up in time for people to prepare for and take place in the BOINC Pentathlon. Note that this is being changed to a time based, not points based, duration, as it would be difficult to have an estimate of balanced points across 3 divisions and 4 time zones.

How about separating bigadv into its own division, giving us GPU+CPU folding, bigadv folding, CPU crunching, GPU crunching? Bigadv units are pretty obvious in the stats. Bigadv folders would still be able to supplement their points with GPU+CPU, but it would still fall into the bigadv folding division. That may keep the domination of hardware more well rounded. No one can dominate more than 25% of the contest. It also puts the weight back to 50/50 on folding and crunching. And if we do this again next year, we can drop back to a 3 division team, as bigadv will be gone, barring any further changes from PG.
 
And yeah, I wasn't thinking about how much more difficult it would be to keep track of the stats with people jumping around on projects.
 
Anyone else can chime in with ideas or interest too! All input is welcome.
 
Edit: Rephrased part of the post as a question.

Looks like I'm going to have to make swag for this one!

This page http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=teambycpid&team=Crunching%40EVGA&sort=yesterday will give you all the projects that teammates are working on.  Looks like there are 24 that had points yesterday.
 
If I might make a suggestion, it might be easier if, in the signup page, you have 2 text boxes available for crunchers, in which they can enter lists of the CPU and GPU projects they are working on.  That should give you the GPU/CPU split as well as the ones you might want to track for the contest.

It looks great!  I was thinking people could enter 2 divisions (one folding and one crunching) but that might be more complexity than you want.

Oh, hey, Contest talk!  If  you want, my hourly stats are available!  I just need to know how many people are going to be folding

drougnor
Oh, hey, Contest talk!  If  you want, my hourly stats are available!  I just need to know how many people are going to be folding

Oh my, that would be wonderful. My stats system was rather rough, although I can still try it out for crunching. At this point, I have no idea how many people will be involved, as sign ups aren't really open yet. I should be able to get it open tomorrow as well as posting an official thread/announcement of the TZC.
 
I just noticed I have it set to kick-off on Easter day. I hope that doesn't cause any issues.

Option 3 sounds ideal since crunchers could use all their hardware yet still keep points separate (assuming it is feasible to pull all the stats you need to make that possible).  Sadly I will be on vacation until the 30th so I won't be able to join, but I'll try to help you with stats in advance if you like.
 
One other thing - are you going to add a prize donation form?  I will be back at the end of the contest so I could set up the prize picker tool to handle prize distribution.