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YAFU / Re: Project Updates
Last post by Dingo - Yesterday at 11:26:54 PM #10
Prime Crunch / Re: Project Update
Last post by Dingo - September 20, 2026, 10:30:27 AMQuoteWhat shipped this week (week 38)
andy
andy
9 hours ago
0
A round up of what has changed on the site this week. There is no new client this week, and every channel is still on 3.3.47.
Challenges
Challenges are time-boxed competitions with gold, silver and bronze medals for members and for teams. @Carlos suggested one in last week's thread, and @Carlos and @PDW told me how challenges usually work elsewhere. The first, Sweepstakes, started at 00:00 UTC today and runs for a week on n below 500,000. 8 members and 3 teams entered. In its first 15 hours entrants completed 1.47 million jobs, 93,002 TeraOps.
The rules, in short. A job counts if it was handed out after the start and finished before the end, so a backlog built up the night before counts for nothing. The score is ops, so a test twice as long scores twice as much. Members enter themselves and team owners enter their team. A team's score is the work of everyone who was in it at the start, whether or not they entered themselves, and joining a team after the start does not add your work to it. Entry closes at the start. You can withdraw until the end, but you cannot come back in. The challenges help has the rest.
On the page: a countdown to the start, then to the end; the Enter buttons at the top; and once a challenge is running, a chart of the top 10 members and teams hour by hour, drawn as one chart on a wide screen and a small panel per entrant on a phone. Scores refresh every 10 minutes. Medals go on members' profiles and in the team's medal cabinet.
Teams
Every team has a page of its own. Open any team from Teams to see its members and what each has banked for it, a chart of what the team banked at each daily cut-off, its challenges, its medals, and who has joined and left. Joining, switching and leaving are on that page now, not in settings, and each one asks first and says what the move does to your credit.
Team owners can give their team a picture and a description, from Manage team on the team's page, which is also where you rename the team, hand it to someone else, or leave it. Settings now just links to your team. Starting a team is the Start a team button on Teams.
What joining a team brings with it. At each 00:00 UTC cut-off a team banks everything its members have done since the last cut-off at which they were in any team. Your first cut-off in any team therefore brings your whole history. Switching teams brings only what no team has banked yet, which is normally that day's work. The help used to say "your first cut-off on a team", which read as though every new team got your whole history. It does not, and the help now says so. On a team's chart a member's first cut-off can be years of work in one bar, so those bars are cut down to the team's busiest ordinary day and hatched, with the full figure when you hover over them.
The sweep
Every k is complete to n = 200,000, at 21:41 UTC last night. See Every k is complete to n = 200,000. As I write this the sweep is in the cell at n = 210,000, and the band from 200,000 to 299,999 is 22.5% done.
Smallest available work now takes reserved k as well. Two cells sat at 99.9% for days. The candidates left in them were on three k somebody had reserved, working from n = 500,000 up. The sweep skipped any k reserved by someone else, and the reserver's own ranges never asked for n below 500,000, so nothing could hand those candidates out. The sweep would have stalled the same way at every k reserved like that. It now walks every k whoever holds it. A reservation still stops anyone else's work ranges taking the k. It no longer stops the sweep passing through it.
The sweep page has one bar for the whole overview, as @Carlos asked, split into the work behind the sweep and the work ahead of it, with a marker where they meet. Yellow on the strips is now labelled "Allocated to a machine" rather than "Being tested now": it includes numbers sitting in a machine's backlog that it has not started yet.
Jobs
How long a job can go quiet before it is taken back now depends on its size. It was a flat week. At the moment it is a day below n = 250,000, two days below 500,000 and a week above that, so a machine that is switched off does not sit on small jobs for days. The times can be set separately for k you have reserved; for now they are the same. A running job reports progress every 5 minutes, so it is only at risk if the machine goes silent. Work still in a backlog, and n below 20,000, report nothing, so their clock runs from when they were handed out. The jobs help shows the current times, read live from the server, because they will be adjusted from time to time. The date for each job in your queue is on Jobs, Queued.
Machines and territory
The machines page counts your backlog. It said "0 queued" beside a Queued work page showing 240, because it only counted started work. It now shows running, queued (the same total as the Queued work page, linked to it) and, when there is any, paused: started work above the machine's process count. The allowance figure counts all three.
Territory numbers could be days old. The server kept serving an old copy of the territory data to the first visitor after a quiet spell, and the two API servers could hold different old copies, so the numbers could go backwards on a reload. A cached copy now goes out for at most one refresh period past its expiry. The same fix covers the other cached pages, such as the sweep, top primes and platform stats.
Territory columns are one unit wide, about 4 k each rather than 15. Each column takes the colour of whoever has done the most tests in it, so a member working one k in a wide column shared with a bigger range could vanish from the map entirely. Hovering over a column now lists every finished k in it, with its owner and test count.
Profiles and pages
"Primes in T5K" counted re-tests. The card on settings and the dashboard counted every prime at t5k size your machines had tested, including ones somebody else found first. Mine said 131; I found 10. Both cards now count your discoveries only, which is what your public profile already showed.
Pictures on the boards. Challenge boards and Top Crunchers show members' profile pictures, and team boards show the team's picture.
Some messages had lost their styling. Alerts, loading spinners and some groups of buttons were showing unstyled. They look right again.
The forum's posting threshold can be waived. You need 1 peta-op of completed work to post on the forum. An admin can now waive that for a member with a reason to post sooner. Starting a team keeps the threshold.