Overview
- Open to all – The competition is open to all high schools and their students in the US.
- Use your own equipment – Get permission from the owner of any device you crunch on, including any school hardware!
- Play nice – Don’t engage in bullying to encourage people to crunch for you. Don’t use racist, sexist, or other harmful language in your BOINC profile.
- Time-Sensitive – Credits earned outside of the competition period do not factor into your ranking, but we encourage you to keep donating your computational power to science even before the competition launches and after the competition is over!
Cheating & Competition Standards – All participants are expected to act honorably and with good faith. Should the host, in their determination, find that there is reason to believe a student or school has engaged in cheating, they will become ineligible for prizes. This is solely left to the discretion of the host. No individual may use hardware they do not directly own without clear, written permission.
Examples of cheating would include:
- Installing the BOINC software onto computers without authorization of that computer’s owner
- Buying computational time on web hosting or computing services like Amazon AWS, Google Colab, etc or using their “free” tiers which is a violation of the terms of service of those providers
- Asking people with no connection to the school or its students to participate on behalf of the team. Examples of this would include buying online ads to encourage people to participate. Asking family and friends of a student or faculty is absolutely acceptable
- Paying or offering to pay people to run the BOINC software or join the school’s team
- Modifying the BOINC software to grant extra credit, grant credit without work being completed, or engaging in other forms of attacks to grant more credit than one would normally be granted.
- Otherwise breaking the terms of service of BOINC or the chosen BOINC project
As part of the expectation to act honorably and with good faith, participants may not:
- Have vulgar, racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic or other harmful language in their username, team name, profile picture or user profile or BOINC project forum posts.
- Engage in bullying or other coercive behavior to get other students to participate in the competition
Determination of Rules – The interpretation of these rules will be fully up to the competition host in their sole discretion.