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Re: The Prize #2
Chris and all,
> You need to get the word out to a group larger than the TASS
> mailing list. University students in Computer Science and
> Astonomy.
I rarely do a single purpose thing. Besides the data goal, I am testing the
diffusion power of the internet. I think it has changed. I expected that
word would get around that some fool was offering a $20,000 prize for a
simple computing task and I would be swamped. I suspect that the $ now
sends most mail to the trash.
A few years back the sci.physics.fusion asked if I would go to Rome to
investigate an excess energy claim. I said I would go if enough people would
send in $10 to pay the cost. Money came in from everywhere and I was shortly
able to go to Rome and look at the machine that produced "excess energy" from
a spinning pump with holes in the rotor. Just junk science. Calorimetry is
hard. I even got in a British Television Documentary from the trip.
Actually they recreated the trip so there was enough money in the till to
send me to Rome twice.
The internet is not what it used to be. Everyone is immune to money
proposals. But of course, this one is real. So it hides among junk. But I
am still expecting the word to slowly diffuse. It is just a question of what
the time constant will be.
BTW, before you all have visions off me with great food and fine wine, the
excess energy machine was in Rome GA. I did bring home a bottle of wine
though. I got it in a basket in the isle at Super K Mart. It had a race car
driver on the label.
Tom Droege
On Friday 17 September 2004 12:53 pm, Chris Albertson wrote:
> --- tom <tdroege2@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > The response to the first prize offer was pretty underwhelming
> > considering the
> > size of the prize offered.
>
> You need to get the word out to a group larger than the TASS
> mailing list. University students in Computer Science and
> Astonomy.
>
> Get people from "outside" to work on this.
>
> Make a big and atractive webpage the describe the prive and
> the problem in terms someone with some education but knowing
> Nothing about TASS could read.
>
> You've got a Wiki. start a page about possable methods to
> improve the data there.
>
> You may want to allow group efforts by teams
>
> Some ideas about the rules.
> 1) Limiting the hardware is a good idea. If it requires a half year
> on a 100 node cluster you can't use the result. But don't put
> to many restriction on it. Maybe you can raise the prize to
> $25K and then say the prize will be reduced by the cost of the
> hardware and any other equipment Or maybe it's a $25 prize and the
> winner has to hand over the hardware?
> 2) The tools must be freely available and all source code must be
> provided.
> 3) The result must by replicated by (at least) one other party
> using the tools
> provided in #2 above. (This insures that (a) ALL the tools where
> in fact delivered and (b) the data was not "cooked".
>
> A $20K prize is large enough that someone might cheat. I could
> get the scatter in the results down to << .0001 by simply
> writing a program that determines that ALL stars have magnitude 5.0
> "scater" should not be the only criteria.
>
> OK if making them all 5.0 is disallowed what if I round each
> magnitude to the nearist 0.1 mag. That's "bining" and it would
> reduce scatter too. What about other more clever ways to
> cheat that are harder to detect? How about rounding to a
> direction determined by crytographic
> hash function of the RA, DEC location? A good crypographic
> hash would be statistically undetectable but could reduce
> statter to near zero.
>
> I'm pretty sure I could "improve" the TASS data by any factor
> with just a simple hack that "fudges" the result of each star
> by no more then 0.05 mag. If the code to implement the hack
> where distributed, one line here and another line there over
> a 20,000 line program you would not find it.
>
> It will be hard to come up with a definition of what it takes to
> win. You would need to know the magnitude to every star in
> advance but then if you did why do a survey?
>
> I once entered a bridge building contest and got third place
> The winner read the rules more carfully then I did and found
> that while you could use only 40 linear feet of 1/8" balsa wood
> the amount of glue was not limited. He build his bridge out
> of dried glue wih a bit of balsa wood in it.
>
> > My first assumption is that Americans
> > have lots
> > of money and little time. Not so true in Canada where people seem to
> > have
> > more time and less money. The statistics are not very good. ;^) I
> > had said
> > (all mail lost) that I wanted at least a half dozen respondents to go
> > through
> > the work of investigating the tax and other consequences. I got 2 or
> > three.
> > Only two really responded in a positive way.
> >
> > Still, the quality of those that did apply is exceptional. So I am
> > quite
> > tempted. I just hope a few more will show interest.
> >
> > For those that missed he first mailing, I have proposed a prize of
> > $20,000 for
> > work leading to the improvement of the tass data. I think it would
> > be
> > appropriate to have a debate here as to what the rules should be, and
> > then we
> > would set a fairly long period to demonstrate a positive result. Say
> > the
> > year 2005. I think pushing the noise floor below 0.02 or 0.01 would
> > be a
> > suitable goal for such a prize. No result, no prize. The method
> > would also
> > have to be practical. I have to be able to process all the data in a
> > year
> > using a half dozen or so GHz computers.
> >
> > Jennifer exploded when she saw the first offer but I think I have
> > convinced
> > her that this is a good way to advance a project that I have already
> > spent
> > much more in pursuing.
> >
> > If any of you are interested in participating, send again a short
> > mail
> > message. For those of you new to me it should include some
> > indication of
> > your qualifications.
>
> =====
> Chris Albertson
> Home: 310-376-1029 chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com
> Cell: 310-990-7550
> Office: 310-336-5189 Christopher.J.Albertson@aero.org
> KG6OMK
>
>
>
>
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