:: 15-Dec-1999 17:22 (Wednesday) ::
At long last the baby is here. Ethan James Wilson was born at 12:40 a.m. Saturday, Dec 11 (06:40 Saturday UTC, for all
you stats freaks). He was 8 pounds, 13.5 ounces and 20 inches. Tricia and Ethan both came home Monday, and we’re trying to
figure out what “normal” means all over again.
As you know, we will be starting work on OGR soon. OGR brings a whole mess of problems to what you know of stats today.
When keymaster hands out an OGR node, there’s no way of knowing how much work that node will require – it can even vary by
CPU. To give full credit for your work, stats will have to keep track of how much work you actually had to perform.
(You’d certainly like more credit for 10 nodes of 1000 effort than someone who did 10 nodes of 100 effort.) It’s also not
possible to say how much work we’ll have to do at the project level, so concepts like “percent done” and “odds of finishing
today” are pretty meaningless.
On top of this, we’re learning some things about managing multiple projects in a single database. Currently, a new project
means a new family of SQL tables, PHP scripts, a new import and a new stats run. For our sanity, we’d like to reduce the
duplication as much as is reasonable. I’m putting together some prototypes of options for the next generation of stats so we
can poke and prod them to see how well they work. If you notice some drool on the stats database, that’s probably because I’m
holding Ethan while typing. I’ll get it all mopped up before we do anything to the stats you know and love.
I’m also informally collecting ideas for ways we can rank individuals and teams across multiple projects. In particular, we
want to allow participation in any open project to contribute to the overall ranking. As it stands now, there’s a lot of
motivation for teams to stick with RC5-64 to protect their ranking, instead of helping out with CSC. Just think how fast we
could be demolishing CSC with a keyrate in the 80’s instead of the 20’s!
Happy cracking!