Cloned accounts folding competitively

Started by CharlieFortsConscience

spmm Lv 1

Hi Anthion, thank you for your comments, they are not helpful logical or relevant, and frankly the tone is getting a bit strident. Please see comments by B_2.

Mark- Lv 1

I wonder what people would have said if I had multiple accounts working on every puzzle for the last 4 months or more. I'm sure I could crowd out some of the less experienced players on many puzzles and in the rankings. Hardly fair though, is it? Even if one of the solutions really is the 'better' one

For the sake of transparency, I still have multiple accounts but only use one now. Two I created when experimenting in my early days and one joined the CASP group, Anthropic Dreams. That one is now used as a group chat backup. Since CASP I have used only one account folding a single copy at a time.

As an example: Can you imagine your favourite sports team entering themselves multiple times for a competition? 1st attempt, they lose. Ok, no problem, let's call ourselves something else and have another go… lost again. Never mind, let's try this name and use different tactics… still no luck… a few more attempts later they win and congratulate themselves on how good they are. Doesn't sound fair to me.

Admittedly there have been times, especially on some of the design puzzles, when I wished I could have gone back to a lower scoring solution and have that admitted to Foldit as my best, especially when it had better h-bonds and just 'looked better'. That, however, is something we all have to live with.

The only other option I can see is to have 'zero-point' accounts whereby players have the ability to opt-out of the points for those accounts. You could have an option on the account page to 'award this account zero points'. That way people could explore as many variations as they have accounts, whilst having no impact on the scoreboard. Evolvers of these solutions would also receive no points. If the multiple account holders are really only interested in finding the best solutions, they wont mind not getting any points for them, or for their teams, will they?

Seagat2011 Lv 1

There is a problem with having only 1 account: If you have multiple clients open and you don't close them in the correct order (from highest score to lowest), you can inadvertently overwrite your absolute best. And lose it forever. I've done this before. I've sold the movie rights to SyFy, and they will be producing a movie about it this fall, on the discovery channel. (It will be a romantic comedy)

CharlieFortsConscience Lv 1

Step in the right direction

(I know this is a duplicate post in the thread noted above
http://fold.it/portal/node/989662#comment-11049)

Beta's uber-reset button will solve short-term requirements, but not everyone runs the advanced gui.

Big thanks should go to jflat for coming onto #global and chatting through some of the problems that currently exist.

I also believe that massively increasing the number of save slots available, to 80, or even 100 would help. Since the scripting 'status quo' is currently limited to 10 slots, having 100 available would allow you to run 10 clients simultaneously, with the same solo position, using the same script. You WOULD have to have 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc versions of each script to avoid overwriting slots, but it would give a little more freedom to those with the hardware to exploit true exploring.

It would also be a step closer to truly emulating what we do with hand-rebuilding. With high-end hardware being more and more common-place, the dev team have a chance to be pro-active, rather than reactive. 100 slots. Job done.
CFC

infjamc Lv 1

Even better, of course, would be increasing the number of save slots available to the capacity of one's hard drive. After all, I would imagine that some people might design evolution-like folding techniques that involve generating a large number of structures (say, rebuilding a segment 100 times and then saving one copy of each generated result) and then combining the best aspects of each solution through score comparisons, etc.

==> Also useful would be implementing a command line option into foldit, so that one can call scripts with parameters without having to create one copy of the script for each instance of foldit (e.g. simply type in "process_protein(5)" for the fifth instance).

Rav3n_pl Lv 1

Reset button will be nice, it need only ask user for save current AND best solution or create automated "manual" saves named ie "date-time-creditbest" and "date-time-current" (autosave will be nicer, no one will forgot to save and cry on forum about another lost points). This will allow user to back to solution it need in any moment.
Increasing numbers of save slots or "just" allow to save/load on name form script ie: quicksave("type-save-name-there") or just quicksave(any-number) would be nice add on too.

spmm Lv 1

closed tracks implemented and agreement that folders will have one folding name and one IRC name only