I do a bit of the COVID Project Discovery project every day. It’s relaxing, and it’s fun to open the reward chests, even if they aren’t very lucrative. Plus the small trickle of isk is nice too. I’m now level 20; each submission gets me 90K isk or so, and (more importantly) a small sense of satisfaction that I’m contributing in some way to science.
But that’s one of my questions. How exactly am I contributing? I read this recent blog post from the sponsors of the project, and I didn’t understand it well.
In particular, it talks about “mirroring” clusters. What do they mean by that? Also the post seems to imply that we can bisect clusters, but we can’t, can we? Our polygons can’t touch each other. I guess the general thrust of this post is that we should identify more rather than fewer clusters?
More generally, is the idea here that we humans are better at pattern recognition than computers?
Finally, on a more selfish note, I’m curious how high the isk rewards go. My 90K creeps up every time I get a submission really right. You level 100 folks, how much do you make per submission?
I am past level 350 running at 99% that yields 89 points per slide and 99000 ISK. The uncertainty of how much longer this mini game will run keeps me motivated to complete the set of gifts at level 650. Anyone have data on the distribution of SKINs? I have yet to see the Hel and about three others. Are they random or some weighted distribution?
I am still under 100 in this ‘Cytometry’ discovery mini-game. But the last one which dealt with transits (which I liked far more), I took to 500 three times. Just checked and only have two HEL skins/paints from the at least 1500 samples. So it did not show up very often. There was never need for me to go beyond 500 before, as I don’t recall them ever offering a paint at 650, for the Marshal, but maybe I mis-remember. Cme to think of it I have 5 or 6 Pacifiers and several bpc’s, and 2 Enforcers, and several bpc’s, so maybe I went closer to 2000 inputs. So a HEL paint once every thousand maybe?? Good luck.