Hey, I'm just happy you're taking the time to engage in the conversation on badges! There is no hurry :) Rather have the project run long term than not.

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Was playing with a pixel editor instead of doing the 12 other things I should have been doing. How about these.. they'll look OK at 48x48 at least.

gold:
silver:
bronze:

red:
blue:
green:
magenta:
white:

Those look good. Before seeing this post, I was gonna suggest using the 5 circles themselves as a color change template.

I agree. Especially in such low res. any fancy illustration of a NN will be almost impossible to make. If anyone artsy has a counterproposal just step forward. I would be more than okay with those and rather see the science homepage regularly updated as you have done so far and keep us up to date. Just my two cents.

In the end you might still decide to add another set of badges for later and more complex experiments. Such sub-project badges are implemented at quite a few BOINC projects. Time will tell :)

Was playing with a pixel editor instead of doing the 12 other things I should have been doing. How about these.. they'll look OK at 48x48 at least.

gold:
silver:
bronze:

red:
blue:
green:
magenta:
white:

They look good to me. Now get back to the other 12 things! LOL (Hope one of them is GPU's.)

Just realized that your rationale was starting from the network with a blue and red layer connected by those green connectors. IMHO the contrast suffers a bit especially with the blue/red background. Just like you did with the dark green background. Maybe what you could play around very easily that should only take minimal effort is to slightly change the background colour to a lighter/darker shade to increase contrast. Just an idea. Or else change the base colours of those nodes to a lighter/darker shade instead and stay with the current background colours.

I could imagine changing the dark blue to like a turquoise/cyan shade (R: 40 / G: 240 / B: 210) and the red to like a dark bordeaux red maybe. (RGB 170/0/15)

Might also increase visibility if you were to use just thicker lines instead of those broad wedge connectors and connect all 1st layer nodes with every layer 2 node directly (6 small vs. 4 broad connections). For the second idea, I have no clue how that would look at low res. Maybe worth a 5 min exploration, Idk...

Just some thoughts

I'll probably lighten up all of the backgrounds a bit (several are too dark), but otherwise I'm going to move forward with this basic design. Hopefully get to enabling this later this week.

Awesome! Thank you John!

Don't look now, but some badges are now LIVE!

Badges based on total credit RAC (25%, 5%, 1%) are a live. I have other milestone badges ready to go for per-app credit, but they're not turned on at the moment. I turned on per-app credit accounting tonight, but haven't figured out how to make all your previous credit count towards that. Once done, we'll have 10K, 500K, 1M, 500M, 1B badges to assign. Note I may not be able to fix that and might turn on the badges anyway. What do you think?

There's also one special Early Adopter badge, which I'll give to everyone who has credit on the 100day anniversary of this project... which will be.. OCTOBER 8th! 1 week away.. so tell your friends/teamates if that want this badge, they'll need to sign up and have credit in 8 days.

Also, this is a new feature, there are bound to be bugs. Report any issues you see.

Looking good so far...

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Works for me. Good job.

Hmm. Getting pre-last-night credit added to the per-app credit accounting is going to be more difficult then we thought.

I'm tempted to turn on milestone badges, with the caveat that it may take some time before we can allocate june-september credit towards those badges (but new credit will count..).
Or, we could just declare that milestone badges start from today and move on with the science. The milestones aren't *that* high.

Either way, we're going to either confuse some people or make them unhappy :/.

Also, informal poll: When you get a miletstone badge (500K credits, 1M credits, etc..) my understanding is that other projects remove the old badge and replace it with the new one. We could do that, but would it be more fun to keep them all assigned to you?.. it's not like once you hit 1M credits, you suddenly don't deserve the 500K credit badge anymore.

Thoughts?

Honestly, I do feel very much compensated for my contribution by the weekly TWIM notes and the information policy that you put in place here in general. That in my opinion does all the volunteers' time, money and knowledge contribution more justice than a 48x48 pixel bit artefact. The very fact that you treat the people interested in ML in general through this project as citizen scientists by updating us in a timely manner, asking feedback from us and motivate active participation on the discussion boards (making polls, timely bug hunting, beta tests, etc.), is just another proof of your work ethic and that you do care not just about the project but also the people.

I for my part, really enjoy reading these weekly editorials and see first hand that you actually advance science and being able to participate on the incremental progress that you deliver here. That is exciting. And I know that some projects hardly ever talk about their processes, how their apps work, what the future pipeline might look like, what progress is being made, giving WU silly + unintuitive names, never updating their science page and don't monitor their discussion forums on a regular basis, so in essence they just leave their volunteer base completely in the dark,. That is worth more than anything. I love to monitor how things proceed very much and gives me as a volunteer the opportunity to opt out/in based on whether I like what I read and what direction the science is taking. Everyone is thus well informed and able to decide on their own whether they like to support MLC or not. However, I don't know how other people will feel about this topic...

my thoughts are as follows:
1) Science and longevity of the project first then badges
2) I'd rather trade in a badge for the continuation of the weekly updates
3) If you really think about a proper way of showing your appreciation to the early adopters that might lose quite some points in the end by adopting the badges, I'd put the idea in the room to rather scale back the date for consideration of the early adopter badge. What about setting this to a date that is just a few weeks after the initial inclusion/announcement of the project in the BOINC project list. By this, you could compensate for the loss of initial credit with a rather unique badge that won't be achieved by anyone else. I don't really see a one-for all solution, and ultimately it is your decision.
4) Maybe you could think about adding paper-based badges as seen on GPUGRID. They assign a badge for each volunteer having contributed to this rather significant milestone. Don't know if that is technically doable and if you would like such a concept in general.
5) I'd rather collect badges, than lose the ones already achieved because only the highest-ranked badge is kept.

Finally, I stand by my first statement. This is just icing on the cake for me John :)

Thanks for letting us participate in this discussion!

My preference is to keep them all but either way is acceptable.

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To be clear: no one it losing any credit.

Each user still has all the credit on their account, both before and after the change to per-app credit reporting. It's just the credit they have before last night is "unassigned" (for lack of a better term) to an app, and any they get now is. Since milestone badges are given per app, and it's not quite as straightforward to assign the existing "unassigned' credit, people might be in this weird place for a bit where they've done enough to earn a badge but don't get credit for it.

In a way, if milestone badges were given as "credit since Oct 1 2020", and the early adopter badges are a way to say "and I have older credit too!".

I'm not too worried about it. And I'm not spending a lot of time on it. But for some people it's a fun motivator. And remember, this is supposed to be fun!

But for some people it's a fun motivator. And remember, this is supposed to be fun!

I highly agree on the fact that participating in any of those DC projects should come along with fun and excitement.

To be clear: no one it losing any credit.

Sorry for misusing the word lose in this context where I originally meant to say "unassigned" as you put it fittingly.

In a way, if milestone badges were given as "credit since Oct 1 2020", and the early adopter badges are a way to say "and I have older credit too!".

I concur with you on this view and think this would be a good way to go. (IMHO)

And I'm not spending a lot of time on it.

And you shouldn't :)

Cheers

I'm a badge hunter (of sorts). Obvious by my signature. But I wholeheartedly agree with the sediments conveyed by bozz4science, especially about the way this project has been run so far. There is NO hurry to get the badges implemented, especially if it takes away from real project work. I love badges, but i love well run project better.

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Milestone badges turned on. News post out. Twittter announcement here: https://twitter.com/MLCHome2/status/1311878784132485121

The more badges the better ;)

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