Bitcoin Forum

Many of you may be familiar with the three doors problem, aka the Monty Hall problem. (info on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem)).

Basically it states that you have three doors presented to you, one which holds a car behind it.  You pick one giving you 1/3 of a chance of having the right answer, but then you're presented what's behind one of the doors you didn't pick, and it's not the car. If you switch your pick, your chances of being right increases to 2/3, instead of your original chance of 1/3.

Here's the results of a simulation
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Monty_problem_monte_carlo.svg/583px-Monty_problem_monte_carlo.svg.png

So what if we give miners the monty hall problem? We could increase the chances of finding the right hash by a nice margin.

So in a pool you could effectively have it so 90% of miners ditch 1/3 of the hashes that need to be tested, and 10% of the miners work on the ditched ones.

Who's going to show you there is a goat behind a door?

You misinterpret the statistics behind purely random hashing.

In the Monty Hall problem, the host has knowledge that the player does not.  In bitcoins, the pool does not have this knowledge.

Monty Hall does not open one of the 2 remaining doors at random, he shows you one which does not contain a car because he knows which one has the car in it.

If you do what you suggest you would just increase variance by a wide margin which is what pools are looking to reduce.

Indeed, this doesn't work. The "host" needs to know which door to open that doesn't have the right thing. The extra odds comes from the information the host gives you. If miners just discard blocks at random, it does nothing to help your odd.

To show you the truth of this, imagine that the host doesn't know anything about where the car is. You pick a door, he opens one, then you switch. 33% of the time you'll have picked the right door to start, 33% of the time, the host will open the right door (ending the game early) and 33% of the time you will switch and find the right door. As you can see, your odds didn't go up by switching doors.

You sir have hit the nail on the head.

In a weird coincidence, I just explained the monty hall problem to my daughter today.  *Checks for hidden microphones*

There is a specific term for this kind of phenomenon, but it escapes me at the moment.  I believe the term is Dutch or some other similar language.  It basically states that upon learning new information or discussing something long forgotten the likelihood of hearing about it fairly shortly afterwards is increased.

When the host picks the right door at the start you win. No more need to switch.

When the host picks the wrong door, then what exactly is the situational difference between this and the monty hall problem? In both cases you've gotten one wrong door open, and two doors closed. That gives you 2/3 of a chance if you switch.

I wrote a C implementation, source here http://pastebin.com/PN2k6HZP

Basically it makes a hash from a random number between 0-99,999, then the number is found via two methods, each run 99 times.
The first method is an implementation of the monty hall problem.
The second method is purely random.  Neither ever tests the same number twice.

example output

Most times I ran it the monty hall implementation ran with the lowest average tries, but when the purely random method won it would usually win by a larger margin than the monty hall problem.

Good, run it a few more hundred thousand times and then run a chi-square analysis.

I think you will find that they are not significantly different in terms of how often they find the hash.

In the Monty Hall scenario the host ALWAYS picks the wrong door, and you are using this particular piece of information it to your advantage by switching.

The pool cannot do this (only picks a random door).

Think about it for a moment.

EDIT: By always picking the wrong door he is artificially lengthening the game (the game never ends on round 2), making it a completely different problem/game than the pool.

This is awesome!

This is just like the youtube video I saw the other day.

Some dude (solo miner) had noticed that it takes him minimum of about 2 days to solve a block. 

So his "solution" to the "wasted" time was to switch to pooled mining for 2 days each time he solves a block, and then switch back to solo mining.

???

thanks, that's an excellent suggestion.  seeing how we're dealing with random numbers and the doors aren't guaranteed to have prizes I don't really doubt that statistically this method is completely unsound.  However I didn't know about chi-square tests and I've got other ideas I'd like to map out using this method.

Why don't we have The Price is Right have an episode where instead of a car, it's 2,000 BTC, and then this will be a relevant conversation :)

Why don't NVIDIA and Intel develop a processor that only does 1 hash per second, but it's always the exact right one?

Why don't you make such a suggestion to the show?

Or maybe the two people who DONT win have to go on a date with Drew Carey!

I wonder if nvidia is aware of their deficiency in hashing speed?  If network growth continues, sooner or later they'll notice the sales being lost to their competitor.

Nvidia has made it's mark as a provider of "superior" visualization equipment, especially on the professional side. Bitcoin miners even now are an almost insignificant fraction of AMD's total sales.

AMD doesn't even care about bitcoin miners...

...especially since bitcoin mining is a fad with little future market potential anyhow.

Have you seen how hard it is to get even last-gen AMD hardware?  I'd be surprised if they weren't aware of this phenomenon, and I still say sooner or later, NVidia will notice.  As to the longevity of this "fad", only time will tell.

I think you need to check your math.

The entire Bitcoin mining network might POSSIBLY contain 30,000 GPUs, assuming a large spread of cards pulling less than 200MH/s.

Even at the most liberal of estimations of GPU's in the network, do you seriously think AMD and ESPECIALLY Nvidia are going to go out of their way to cater to ~30,000 unit sales? Especially into an already saturated market with extremely little potential for future capacity?

Think again kids.  Think long, and hard about it.

EDIT:  Just so you realize the utter futility of your conception, roughly 25 million GPUs are sold....EACH QUARTER.

So, you were saying?

Couple things that you are overlooking.

Majority of GPU sales are cheap integrated crap.  Intel is the #1 GPU manufacturer by volume, simply because of the vast number of systems sold with cheap integrated intel graphics.

30,000 as a number of GPUs might be small, but we are talking about 30,000 GPUs that retail for $100-$300 EACH, some even more.  While the 25 million total GPUs you refer to is mostly $2 integrated junk.  If you look at the numbers as money rather than total units, the stuff sold for mining is not statistically insignificant.

Firstly, that's (again, very very liberally) 30k units sold to date. The bitcoin mining network is basically completely saturated at this point.  Furthermore, for all the same same reasons that no businesses of any considerable volume would ever care to use BTC for daily transactions (extreme volatility, questionable legality), AMD and again, ESPECIALLY NVIDIA aren't going to even bat an eyelash at this insignificant hobbyist community.

You think gargantuan multi-national corporations like AMD and Nvidia are going to divert even an iota of R&D towards an anomaly like BTC, that could quite literally disappear in 48 hours or less?

Jesus Christ Almighty you people are naive...

Yes I do, because history shows it already happens.  Are you a gamer?  If so, you might have noticed a lot of games have "nvidia: the way it's meant to be played" logos.  Guess how they get them?  Nvidia spends money working with the developers to optimize the games to work better on nvidia hardware. 

Do you think that for all that work nvidia sees anything close to 3 million in extra sales (30k units @$100 each)?  Not at all, yet they keep doing.  Because even with less extra sales, it's worth it.  History has shown, nvidia will "cater" to anything that has any chance at all of giving them a few sales.

You must be very young, or incredibly stupid, and likely a liberal blending of the two...

Slight bit of difference in the Video Games industry and BTC here, tiger:

One is a speculators bubble with close to zero real world adoption, and the other is A MULTI-FUCKING-BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY THAT'S THIRTY YEARS OLD.

First off, please take a deep breath, close your eyes, and calm down.  This is a simple discussion on a forum, no reason to get all worked up calling people stupid and screaming in all caps.  If you just want to flame away without any logical argument you can have your "win", I won't bother to respond further.

That said, you made a false comparison.  I was comparing spending some time to optimize for BTC mining to optimizing one single game.  Not an entire industry, one game.  Nvidia puts out money and time to work with a developer of a single game just to make sure it runs better on their hardware.

Complaining that BTC mining might just collapse with the speculative bubble is itself silly, because while that may happen, it's 100% certain that a given video game's sales and popularity will spike and collapse, it's the nature of the market.  Obviously nvidia is willing to expend money to optimize a game that might be popular for 2-3 months before fading into obscurity, so I don't think it's too far fetched to say they could consider doing the same for bitcoin mining. 

Worse case, mining sputters out into obscurity in a few months, exactly like the average big budget new release video game.  Best case, it might remain popular for a few more years, or forever.  But as long as the worst case scenario for BTC mining is equal to current PC gaming projects that nvidia invests in, I don't see how your argument holds any water.

For example, here is a list of SLI optimized games.  SLI itself is a niche product, probably less than 5% of PC games run SLI, yet nvidia is putting time and effort into making these games work, some of which were huge duds.

http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html

I think at least half of us here can agree, that this is a stupid, stupid discussion that this has deteriorated into.  NewEgg cares about BTC, and make sure to keep the obsolete cards in stock that we like.  Certain manufacturers like MSI probably keep stocking up with a limited number of AMD stuff because it's consistent business.  AMD itself is unconcerned.

Just so you're clear buddy, NVIDIA and AMD don't optimize a goddamn thing on their end with respect to particular game engines. They spend multiple millions of dollars developing and producing hardware optimized for the widest possible use cases.

They CONSULT with game developers on how to best use their hardware. Not the other fucking way around.

There's a giant, gaping, astronomical difference and you continue to lay bare your naivete for all to see.

You are completely wrong.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=22191

Given your track record for making false statements, if you do choose to respond further please provide a link as some shred of evidence that you know what you are saying, otherwise I'm just going to ignore you.

From your own article:

"NVIDIA, AMD-ATI, and Intel will often send their own coders over to work in-house with the game developer for a few weeks as the game is being developed."

You stupid, stupid motherfucker...

I'd like you both to post pictures of your erect penises next to a ruler, and I will judge.

Grading will be scored in the following categories:

Length
Girth
Angle of the Dangle
Skin tone
General Appeal

Points will be awarded from 1-10 in each category, with a maximum possible score of 50.  I will give the winner 5 BTC, and we will also pronounce them the winner of this thread.

Can I PM it to you instead of in open forum?

lol I suppose thats agreeable if you can get your buddy to accept me as the judge and jury on this one

Nvidia coder, working for a few weeks while a game is being developed !=
"NVIDIA and AMD don't optimize a goddamn thing on their end with respect to particular game engines"

What do you think they are doing for weeks at a time that doesn't involve optimizing?  Are you really trying to argue that because nvidia does the work at the developer's location that it somehow doesn't count?  I never made any claims about how or where nvidia spends resources to optimizing games, I simply stated the fact that they do expend resources for those purposes.

You ever read the patch notes on video card drivers?

( http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx )
New profiles added to this release:
                - Witcher 2 – Resolves missing NPI text and light source issues
                - Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale – Resolves flickering seen when running in CrossFire mode
                - Crysis 2 – Resolves image quality issues with CrossFire enabled seen the latest version of the game patch

Yes, more evidence that what I stated is simply a well known fact.  GPU manufacturers already expend resources optimizing their hardware for specific titles, some of which will only be popular for a couple months before being forgotten.



 ;D

Dude, this all goes back to the argument about these companies doing SOMETHING for the bitcoin community.

The only thing these companies could do for bitcoining is specializing their hardware for hashing.

1.) AMD will not be altering anything in their hardware for bitcoin mining.

2.) NVIDIA will NOT be fucking altering anything in their hardware for bitcoin mining.

3.) Neither of these companies do any sort of hardware optimization for any singular or even moderately sized group of software developers. Microsoft (DX), absolutely.  Valve? Epic Games? Gamebryo? Fuck no. Bitcoin?....NO.

4.) Having a small team of programmers on hand to help with small bouts of consulting with game developers is an INFINITESIMAL portion of their operating budget.

5.) Just shut up, kid. Bitcoining means fuck all to these companies, full stop. Let it fucking go. They don't care about you, they don't give a fuck about you. Or any bitcoin miner. Unless they also buy video games...

You get proven wrong, so you try to move the goalposts.


I never specified hardware.  Software driver optimization is perfectly valid, and actually occurs- check out the 11.6 thread, some people are reporting a 1-2% gain.  Not much, but something.

Instead of arguing against the points I make you just call me a kid and try to change the subject. When it comes to getting angry over forum posts, you are the winner. Congratulations.  I'm not interested in playing that game, so I am done.