Cheating at Seti@home

[Peter Motyka]

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 31, @06:53AM
from the bored-lately dept.
Megor writes "Well it was bound to happen, people are cheating on Seti@home to inflate their work unit statistics, and the people who administer Seti are ignoring the complaints. ZDNET has an article explaining how they are cheating."

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/31/034219.shtml?tid=99

[Michael Kennedy]

This just baffles me.  I can verify that this works, but I never used this method.  Partially cause my cheating method was flawed and it had predicable results because of that.  Let me explain:

I got into a bet with someone that I could do more units in one week than they could.  They knew I had some computers at my work doing units, but to get the kid into the bet I had a 3rd party tell him of a cheating method he "found".  In reality, the cheating method he found was a batch program that I wrote that copied a 98-99% finished unit to his SETI dir, then he finished it, killed the program, reran it and so on and so on.  SETI@home killed his account (which was my plan).  He got around 40 units per day (all the exact same unit) and I still "won" the bet cause cheating was a condition of the bet.  Yeah, it was a bit on entrapment, but he never knew and you would have wanted him to lose the bet anyway.  :)

So, I can verify that the method works, but I don't think that one person can turn in 40 copies of the same unit and not get banned by SETI.  His page used to be up saying "BANNED" for his unit count, but it's gone now.  
   
So, if they're not banning people anymore it's cause the cheaters aren't turning in massive numbers of the same unit, or SETI@home is getting lazy with their biggest "customers".  I bet they just want the big unit count to look better.

[Victor Cardona]

It could also be that they are not doing anything about it because seti@home is scheduled to end in about two months. They may not have the staff or wherewithall to do anything about cheaters at this point.

Hopefully, they will fix their software for Seti@home II so that people cannot cheat as easily.

Victor