Yafu@Home needs to leave some small sequences for us too...
 

I originally posted this in the Aliquot Sequence Reservations thread, but I decided it would get a reply sooner if it was in its own thread.

@Yoyo:
[quote]Is it me or did Yafu@Home beat me to reserving 1945992? I wanted to extend that one until it terminated, merged, or exceeded 110 digits.

[quote]Drop 1116384 (Driver: 2*3)
Taking 1945992[/quote]

Please fix that. I want to reserve it![/quote]

When I first posted my reservation request in the respective thread, the sequence wasn't reserved, so I don't know why it got reserved to Yafu@Home instead of me.

It takes some time until the reservation page shows the reservation. Reservations are checked every hour. I reserved the sequence before your reservation. The hourly reservation script run produced this warning:
[QUOTE]Warning: seq 1945992 is owned by yafu@home but is trying to be reserved by Stargate38!
[/QUOTE]

What should I do? Should I not reserve the small sequences? Smallest unreserved sequences have now a size of 100. Should I skip them and reserve at 101? Would this help?

yoyo

[QUOTE=yoyo;471458]It takes some time until the reservation page shows the reservation. Reservations are checked every hour. I reserved the sequence before your reservation. The hourly reservation script run produced this warning:


What should I do? Should I not reserve the small sequences? Smallest unreserved sequences have now a size of 100. Should I skip them and reserve at 101? Would this help?

yoyo[/QUOTE]

How does your reserving code work? Is it possible to just "skip" the first (say) 100 seqs that you would otherwise reserve?

I do it manually based on which composites I need.

Maybe the reservation script should run every 20-30 minutes. Also, I think Yafu@home should check the recent posts in the reservations thread manually, instead of relying on the hourly script, so as to prevent any more reservation conflicts (like the one in the OP) from happening. And PLEASE unreserve 1945992 (and all other sequences that are currently <10[sup]100[/sup]) so I can get my reservation that I (unsuccessfully) attempted on Thursday, and so that the people with slower PCs (there are still a lot of them out there) can run their own small sequences without having to worry about larger composites.

I checked the reservatin thread and reserved it before you. But anyway I unreserve 1945992 .

[QUOTE=Stargate38;471565]Maybe the reservation script should run every 20-30 minutes. Also, I think Yafu@home should check the recent posts in the reservations thread manually, instead of relying on the hourly script, so as to prevent any more reservation conflicts (like the one in the OP) from happening. And PLEASE unreserve 1945992 (and all other sequences that are currently <10[sup]100[/sup]) so I can get my reservation that I (unsuccessfully) attempted on Thursday, and so that the people with slower PCs (there are still a lot of them out there) can run their own small sequences without having to worry about larger composites.[/QUOTE]

I would suggest merely that yoyo run the [c]reservations.py[/c] script whenever he updates his reserved sequences. That is both simpler and far more likely to work. It was a very unlikely fluke (race condition) that the reservations on the main page hadn't been updated between when yoyo reserved it and when stargate later attempted to (with, through no fault of his own, info that was out of date by a few minutes).

In fact, if yafu@home's sequence selection criteria are sufficiently simple, I might be able to automate it, which would automatically include a [c]reservations.py[/c] call to ensure reservations are always up to date.

Given that the majority of of people running yafu@home don't understand what they are doing would it be possible for yafu@home to only initially reserve sequences that either have a 3 or a driver or guide or have 110+ digits? This means that yafu@home will have the sequences that are slightly less interesting to run manually.
Either this or we could restrict yafu@home by starting value. It would be nice to keep a load of sequences that are easily accessible for people with a single pc to make a decent amount of progress.

On another note it would be nice if there was a visible record of errors in the log. Would it be possible for an automated post to be made in a thread when the log contains an error. This shouldn't happen that often and should only happen less than the number of posts in the reservation thread.

In YAFU (scroll down [url]https://yafu.myfirewall.org/yafu/server_status.php[/url]) I have 5 queues:
yafu-16t: handles C135-C139
yafu-8t: C130-C134
yafu-4t: C125-C129
yafu: C120-C124
yafu-small: < C120
I try to have workunits available in all queues.
So currently I have a demand on more smaller composites.

Currently I reserve only sequences which are < 1.1e6 to keep most sequences for the forum.

[QUOTE=henryzz;471848]Given that the majority of of people running yafu@home don't understand what they are doing would it be possible for yafu@home to only initially reserve sequences that either have a 3 or a driver or guide or have 110+ digits? This means that yafu@home will have the sequences that are slightly less interesting to run manually.
Either this or we could restrict yafu@home by starting value. It would be nice to keep a load of sequences that are easily accessible for people with a single pc to make a decent amount of progress.

On another note it would be nice if there was a visible record of errors in the log. Would it be possible for an automated post to be made in a thread when the log contains an error. This shouldn't happen that often and should only happen less than the number of posts in the reservation thread.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=yoyo;471850]In YAFU (scroll down [url]https://yafu.myfirewall.org/yafu/server_status.php[/url]) I have 5 queues:
yafu-16t: handles C135-C139
yafu-8t: C130-C134
yafu-4t: C125-C129
yafu: C120-C124
yafu-small: < C120
I try to have workunits available in all queues.
So currently I have a demand on more smaller composites.

Currently I reserve only sequences which are < 1.1e6 to keep most sequences for the forum.[/QUOTE]

I was in the middle of a somewhat smaller scale code refactor when I recently encounted a small logic bug and decided a more ambitious refactor was in order, and in the course of this I could write a script which reserves sequences from the main list in accordance with both yoyo's criteria and also henryzz's criteria (or other such as the forum agrees upon). I don't think it would be that hard to do, as long as the criteria are well defined.

But my current plans for the refactoring are... ambitious, to say the least. I'm not sure how long it would take me to do it. It's the sort of refactor that would require as much time writing tests and debugging as actually reorganizing code.

My criteria were aimed to be suggestions. Please feel free to comment. It will be a balancing act between having enough work for yafu@home and saving some enjoyable work for the forum. I am currently enjoying taking sequences at 100 digits to their first c115 or slightly further depending on whether they have a driver.