Recent Neural Network/Superblock issues

[grctest]

Initially reported by AEM7 on 19th Aug 2016

A glitch occurred on 19th Aug 2016 which resulted in a superblock being created that only provided Neural Network statistics for Asteroids@home, Atlas@home and BURP.

The issue was resolved when the next superblock was staked with correct neural network stats, but whatever caused this glitch resulted in 3 projects being assigned 9.67 * more magnitude for a single day.

The potential consequences for this glitch are:

• Daily earnings were affected (positively for those in 3 projects, negatively for the users in the other 26 projects).
• DPOR stake weight will have shifted significantly across the network (Potentially affecting network consensus? If those unaffected are staking more frequently due to increased DPOR stake weight they may have a higher chance of accidentally repeating the glitch? This is all a guess though, I'm not certain how DPOR stake weight works 100%).
• Voting weight was concentrated to a small quantity of users. 20% for a project before resulted in approx 2,606,896 magnitude weight, where as 20% after resulted in 25,200,000; considering several recent foundation expense polls only had approx 50mil voting weight participation, an individual with 25 mil voting weight from a glitch is scary. At the moment it's not a concern because we have human middleman separating the result of a poll from the whitelist/foundation, however if this was an automated voting system we'd have more to worry about.

When this glitch occurred I tried launching the Neural Network window, resulting in my client freezing - does launching the neural network window whilst the client is staking cause the client to freeze or could it be related to this issue instead?

After resetting the client, I ran 'execute syncdpor2' which resulted in all projects showing accurately, not just the 3 reported in the glitched superblock.

We discussed this issue last week in the 'Gridcoin Community Hangout #003'.

Recently, individuals have been reporting similar issues via the forum (0 mag, bad superblock again?):
https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/1331-new-coin-launch-announcement-grc-gridcoin/page-1174#entry222581
https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/1331-new-coin-launch-announcement-grc-gridcoin/page-1174#entry222631

I could create a script for my grcnodes to query the current neural hash and the list of possible neural hashes - anyone know the exact commands for this? (I could create comparison tables to keep tabs on current superblock stats).

Cheers,
CM.

[denravonska]

Alright, let's hope that this is finally fixed with 3.5.9.5.