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Overview
Points  
When are points and statistics updated? World Community Grid points and statistics are updated twice a day. This occurs at 00:00 and 12:00 UTC. This includes all statistics on World Community Grid except for Team Statistics. Team Statistics are updated once a day at 00:00 UTC.
How are Team Points and Personal Points Distributed? Points that you earn are only credited to a team if they are earned while you are a member of that team. Additionally, if you quit a team or a join another team, then the points that you earned for your previous team will stay with that team. You cannot transfer credit you previously earned to a new team. Any points you earn whether you are on a team or not will always show up under your personal statistics. You can view the points that you have earned for different teams at the bottom of your My Grid page.
Why are points not updated even though new work units have been downloaded? Points are awarded for results when they have been successfully processed on your computer. They are awarded after they have been returned to our servers and successfully passed validation. You may learn more about validation here. If you want to check the status of your result(s), you may view your results status page. Additionally, point totals are only updated on the website twice a day, so there can be up to a 12 hour delay between when your result is validated and the points appear on our website
What are points? Your computer contribution is shown in three measures-points, total run time and results returned. The term points is simply used as a way of measuring the amount of computation your computer has contributed. If your computer works for three days on one work unit, or in those same three days completes 5 work units, you will accumulate the same number of points assuming that your computer worked at about the same level of effort in each scenario.
How are points used? The calculation of Points is the method World Community Grid uses to measure your contribution to individual research projects running on World Community Grid. Points are one method for competitive comparison on the stats pages.
Why are points on the agent and the web different? World Community Grid in the past ran two types of agents. A United Devices (UD Windows) agent and a BOINC (Windows/Linux/Mac) agent. Today, World Community Grid only runs the BOINC agent. Points contributed by both of the agents will be part of a members total on the website. However, only points contributed by BOINC agents will be shown on the BOINC agents. The points previously earned by a UD agent only appear on the website. Additionally, due to differences in how the agents computed points, BOINC points are multiplied by 7 when they are imported into the website. Thus if you earned 5 BOINC points, you will see 35 Website points.
What is validation? World Community Grid is a volunteer computing grid. This means that work is being sent to computers that are outside the control of World Community Grid. Most computers that perform this work are reliable. However, there are a few computers that are not reliable due to things such as users over-clocking their machines, memory errors, disk errors, CPU errors or viruses being present on the machine. This means that the results returned need to be validated to make sure that they represent the correct answer. We perform three different types of validation at World Community Grid:
How are points calculated? Points are calculated in a two-step process which attempts to give a consistent number of points for similar amounts of research computation. First, the computational power/speed of the computer is determined by periodically running a benchmark calculation. Then, based on the central processing unit (CPU) time spent computing the research result for a work unit, the benchmark result is used to convert the time spent on a work unit into points. This adjusts the point value so that a slow computer or a fast computer would produce about the same number of points for calculating the research result for the same work unit. This value is the number of point credits "claimed" by the client. More information about that formula is available here. Second, research results returned to the servers are validated in a manner which depends on the research project. Then the claimed points for valid results are examined for anomalous (excessively high or low compared to other machines computing the same or equivalent work unit) values and adjusted accordingly. The servers assign the resulting adjusted point values to the member (and team) for each of the returned work units. This process eliminates the ability for malicious users to tamper with results and artificially claim higher points for their work.
I have completed a result, but I have not yet received credit for it. What is going on? BOINC does not award credit to users until the work they have performed has been successfully validated. This means that users may experience a delay in being granted credit while BOINC waits for enough results to be returned in order to perform validation.
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