Project Discovery Data Bias

I’d just like to point out that Project Discovery rewards players more for the amount they do, then the accuracy they display.

Its a ‘RUSH-TO-SOLVE BIAS’ which will undoubtedly make a mess of the data.

I also don’t see how Eve players are superior to computer algorithms, to the point where a human staring at a graph sees something that a computer does not. Unless… We’re the computer algorithms fail safe. Algorithm construction mines for correlating factors in a set of data, which can lead to availability and anchoring bias. If our data doesn’t match with its data… Then there may be a factor to consider to increase the algorithms accuracy.

But yah, rush to solve bias is still an issue for me. So why was it done this way? The rewards could of been based on time spent doing each individual one, or by accuracy rating and rewards given as a lump sum each day. The accuracy would be way higher, as you would be more likely to get people putting decent effort into doing it right since the amount they did didn’t matter.

For me now, I’m kinda peeved because I’m getting penalized by this system for taking a harder look at the data and spending more time on each graph. Its far more profitable to shoot from the hip in the first 10 seconds. Doing it like this, I still get the obvious ones and most of what others do. I definitely don’t get all of them though and miss an enormous amount of possibilities.

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It was fairly ok till the bots got onto it. And then the data died.

Lol, is the data even useful anymore if bots are involved? It would no longer be a human’s interpretation.

This entire endeavor seems to have not been thought out at all, and is only a gimmick ‘pretending’ to help science.

I agree that rewards should probably be given based on accuracy, especially if we are indeed the human checkers validating the algorithmic results (which makes sense; otherwise, maybe they’re playing on in-game capsuleers’ familiarity with space and stars?).

The problem, though, is that the mini-game does a terrible job of telling a player how to actually find the anomalies. There are the super-obvious ones, of course, those that look like the four examples given on the lower right of that screen; see sudden dips and pulses, mark as transits. But there are also ones that, to me at least, appear to have no transits; but upon grading, I’m failed because I didn’t recognize transits marked by, I’m guessing, more intensely packed data, instead of the obvious nooks and crannies.

So I would encourage CCP to switch to an accuracy-based payout, but only if their program actually teaches us to find all instances of transits accurately. Getting puzzles wrong on my own account is one thing; getting them wrong because I wasn’t shown how to spot the anomalies is something else entirely.

The previous iteration of PD produced some very good results, as did the first round of exo planets data. So it certainly has helped real science, not just a gimmick.

I would like to point out the ISK reward IS and ALWAYS HAS BEEN tied to your accuracy.
So if you have a 99% accuracy rating then when you submit a slide you will get 99,000isk for your work.
If you have an 80% accuracy rating then you will get 80,000isk per slide.
50% accuracy you’ll get 50,000 so on and so forth.
So if you keep spamming no transits you’ll eventually tank your accuracy rating and you wont make any ISK.

You have not factored in how easy it is to stay above 50% by just randomly clicking something that ‘might’ look right within the first few seconds. This isn’t a test, but a game. So the results will skew to whatever outcome the players find more fun. Or, whatever the bots can be programs to click the fastest.

You might get 50k isk per try per slide, but if your doing them 10 times as fast, there’s a huge profit difference in isk AND rank rewards. Its still dependent on volume more then accuracy.

I’m not denying that it’s a game. Nor am I denying that some people are “gaming it” for isk (Hence why they now have a cool down if you go too fast).

I’m merely stating that rewards are accuracy based. You may disagree with the proportion of reward to accuracy, but it IS accuracy based.

Easiest fix would to make it a larger curve instead of straight line. So 50% would give you say 10,000 isk. 80% would give you say 25,000 isk but the real money wouldn’t kick in until 90%+ that would give people more incentive to keep higher accuracy. The same could be done with the amount of points you get to level.

I find it terribly ironic that they created this system to avoid having a program do it because it was innaccurate, and then people started making programs to do it because it was faster.

I play a fair amount of Project Discovery and I think No Transit is a fairly common occurrence. I have been around 80-82% accurate for a while now. The forum posting Eve player knows how to suck the fun out of everything. Everything is a conspiracy! Bots did it!

I have done a TON of project discovery. I’ve been vocal about it from the beginning.
And as for “No Transits” well yeah, statistically speaking about 10% of the stars in the galaxy should have planets on an orbital plane relative to earth and then that system would need to have a Jupiter sized planet up close to it. so that drives the percentage of slides that should have a planet we can see even lower. So yeah, “No Transit” should be the most common thing. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to learn what transits look like and spot them on slides. I’d estimate about 5% of what we look at should have something we should be able to see / mark.

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