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SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years
BoogieGod writes "The SETI@Home project has finally broken 500,000 years of computing time. They haven't detected any Extra Terestrials yet but there have been some interesting close calls. Now if only all 2.6 million of their users could join distributed.net."
Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.
Folding@Home
Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.
I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.
I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?
The number of units can be determined by multiplying this figure by the average time per unit.
Yes, a "number of units" milestone is more meaningful in terms of data processed. The number of years figure is a better measure of participation, which is also an important statistic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hillary (Hilary?) on Everest:
Because it was there.
Perhaps because the spirits O'Neil, Einstein, Fermi, DaVinci, Aristarchus, Curie, Alexander of Macedon, and definitely Sagan might say
Because it might be there.
and I and a great many other people do think
Because it might be there.
And we hope it is.
And to purposely annoy people like that schmuck Senator from Wisconsin who's name escapes me right now who railed against it saying
Don't spend money on little green men. Give me all the money to make more cheese. Or less cheese. Give me all the money. Science is bad.
Idle CPUs are the Republicans' workshop.
I think it's safe to assume we'd be around the middle of the pack, evolution wise, if all life started at the same time as it did on Earth. A few asteroids, slightly different conditions... We could have arrive anytime around now, plus or minus a hundred million years.
Now even 200 years is a huge difference, to our culture. We weren't using radio/etc at all back then, let alone as much as we could.
If there's a bell-curve distribution of times at which races achieve our level of sentience/society/etc, and we're at the middle of that curve, then there're races which are at either end, the ones at one end may still be protozoa now, and the ones at the other end would have had civilizations like ours before mammals existed on Earth.
So, relative to what you must assume the high-end would be, we're probably fairly low, having come only far enough to recently begin asking these sorts of questions.
Then, there's the theory (is it fact?) that stellar evolution is faster towards to galactic core, with brighter, hotter, much more shortly lived stars, which would have produced those elements that life (as we know it) requires in a small fraction of the time that it took for our small cool stars to do it out here on the rim of the galaxy.
And a quick note, I think the original poster knew the speed of light lag was for both directions, I think they refered to that when they said we've only been broadcasting for a hundred years so only systems under 50ly away COULD be responsing by now. I think you just misread it.
but there's a lot of idle cpu's out there with nothing to do - and even then only a small % are connected to SETI@home. And investors are wondering why PC sales are tanking.
Can anyone say, "Market Saturation" ?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Obviously you've forgotten that unless we explore space and set up permanent colonies all the Earth exploration won't do our species much good when the supervolcano erupts, the next big rock slams here or the Sun finally dies killing us all.
That's what the OGR Project on distributed.net is for.
Some actually scientifically useful work to do, unlike looking for ETs with a chance smaller than for cracking a 256 bit key...
IMHO, distributed.net should've dumped the RC5 project after the encryption export laws were changed and fully concentrate on useful stuff.
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Look at the results per CPU/OS... ;-)
5th entry
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Sounds a bit odd to me. The tin foil hat brigade would probably think they were trying to cover something up with that lame explanation. I think they're just being a bit too cavalier (read "incompetent") about the whole process.
-- Alastair
This isn't a slam - I find the stuff interesting. My point is that there is probably a much broader appeal in the science of SETI.
The chances of locating some signal from space originated by intelligent life is, of course, very very small. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of people think it is non-zero. The potential impact to human society of discovering ET intelligent life is huge. That's what draws people, I would think. (plus, it is a pretty screensaver).
It is a lot easier for people to understand the potential impact of SETI than that of discovering Golomb rulers.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I think the only thing that they have shown is not that there is any intelligent life out there, but that the power company probably is now richer than bill gates, andrew carnegie, and john t. rockefeller combined ever were.
I am !amused.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
They have some nice graphs of user statistics. What I would like to see is average time per work unit vs. time. This would provide empirical evidence of Moore's "law".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
... Is a pretty client. Get a nice screensaver-client that shows you what you're working on, and distributed.net will get more users.
(There may already be a client like this that I have missed.)
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
Wow! I think the parent is the highest rated and perhaps, first legitimate use of a goatse.cx link!
I think we should look for intelligent life on THIS planet first.
I switched from distributed.net to SETI@home, and here's why: I know a key can be broken with brute force; I wonder if there's life on other planets. It's the mystery that draws me to SETI.
> It seems the link for the "close calls" is forbidden?!? Anyone care to repost what it says somewhere?
I can get to it intermittently.
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
It basically says that they got some funny clusters of spikes in their data, and couldn't explain them... until they noticed that the spikes' dates correlated with downtime for the 'scope.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time?
You (and others who were also bitching/wondering) are missing the point. The reason for celebration isn't that a x amount of years were done; nor is arguing that it could have been done in x/100 hours on decent machines a worthwhile consideration.
The point is that 2.5 million people, between them, have been running their computers collectively for half a million years. Doesn't matter whether this was on 8088s or top-of-the-range z80s, the owners' computers were running, in total, for that time. This is, IMO, a phenomenal achievement.
So how about some help?
I mean, what's the point in discovering extraterrestrial life if we can't crack their private key? :)
SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.
This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:
The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home will hopefully get comparable attention.
Helium balloons want to be free.
The point is that 2.5 million people, between them, have been running their computers collectively for half a million years. Doesn't matter whether this was on 8088s or top-of-the-range z80s, the owners' computers were running, in total, for that time. This is, IMO, a phenomenal achievement.
I kind of disagree. With 2.5 million users, and Seti@Home being around for a couple years now, that's a lot of time people AREN'T running the screensaver. Let's say over a period of one year, at 2 million users. They've been around longer than that, and they've gotten more users, but let's just use those numbers. So, that's two million years worth of potential computing time and they've racked up half a million years of actual computing time. So each person is dedicating less than 1/4 of their potential computing time to the project. That's an average of six hours a day. Most people sleep more than that and you can't tell me, no matter how much time the average slashdotter spends on their computer, that most people are on their computer 18 hours a day.
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
Of course since the largest group of SETI@Home contributers are running Windows I guess we should forgive their poor uptimes.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
If you don't think RC5 is worth the effort, you can always work on distributed net's Optimal Golomb Ruler project. Solving an OGR does have some practical benefits related to cystallography and astronomy.
I kind of disagree. With 2.5 million users, and Seti@Home being around for a couple years now, that's a lot of time people AREN'T running the screensaver
That's just silly. Would you judge the success of the Beatles based on the number who've never bought one of their records?
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
And I'm one of those people. So what? Could the 35 years of time that I've contributed been higher? Yes. But the aim for most users isn't the same as yours; they (we) feel that we're making a contribution, and that we're not dedicated simply because we don't leave machines running all night. Nor are we guilty for the occasaional game of freecell or quake 3 that means fewer units get done.
I can't speak for others, but I'm happy that I'm contributing to a project in the way it was intended.
I think that the distributed.net project is a proof in concept thing.
We all know that brute force can break encyption. By doing it, we demonstrate how simple it is to do.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
> Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.
Given the existence of spyware, I would guess that they already are. We just don't know it yet.
Speaking of which, I once saw a Web page where a guy talked about a demo Java app he had written, which would harvest "spare" cycles from client machines where it was running.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Try running the folding@home client instead. That project produces actual, useful scientific results about protein folding. SETI is just an inefficient search through a million billion haystacks for a needle that probably is not there.
- Have a picture
And it has a really small memory footprint compared to SETI@home.
- Have a picture
I agree that the RC5-64 project is pointless, but Optimal Golomb Rulers are supposed to have some scientific uses.
Beside looking for E.T.? Any research on AIDs, complex math equation, etc.?
:)
Thanks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Who, with Walter Mondale, later to be VP, killed the "Station" part of the "Shuttle/Station" project in the early 1970's. That's right, we could have had a real space station, 20+ years ago.
And as for Idle CPU's. . .as I recall, Proxmire was a Democrat. . .
The problem with SETI is that most life out there isn't intelligent enough or advanced enough to broadcast anything. The window for a civilization to use broadcast methods is relatively small, if you look at earth as an example. I'm sure that point to point communications will replace broadcast within the near future (100 years), a mere instant on the cosmic scale. I would love to see distributed computing used to help the human genome project, protein folding, etc. There are much clearer benefits to doing so.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
5.97 x 10^20
Not bad, eh?
written like a die-hard shell user!
:-)
Checking out Seti's results by OS shows some interesting info. In the 90 OSes listed, MacOS is #3 in results and OS/2 is #20. Linux is #6. Based on SETI's results, F@H should have done the Mac client BEFORE the linux client.
What if the nearest, most benevolent alien civilisation in the universe... talks like static? We could be bathed in signals from all directions but can't see it through all the legitimate static.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Given the assioma that a monkey, typing randomly, has a non-null chance to type in the Amlet (or your preferred novel of your preferred author), I propose a distributed computing project to do just that (after all, world's whole computer set should reach the same intelligence of a monkey)
Ciao
----
FB
"Programming eventually leads to addition with letters"
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
There's been quite a lot of talk lately about PC and computer equipment being responsible for energy shortages. Seen in this context, the IMHO pointless and so far unsuccessful search for aliens seems a waste of energy. Computers are so much more energy efficient when suspended or turned off!
Jilles
Also, if eye-candy is so unappealing, then why all the fuss in the Linux world about SKIN'ing everything?!?!
Every thousand years
This little sphere
Ten times the size of Jupiter
Floats just a few yards past the Earth
You climb on your roof
And take a swipe at it
With a single feather
Hit it once every thousand years
Till you've worn it down
To the size of a pea
Well, I say that's a long time
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Wow.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I hate to nitpick, but Arecibo is not a volcanic caldera, in spite of what the tabloid press might report. In fact, it is a large limestone sinkhole in the karst terrain of Puerto Rico: check out this link for more info. (I promise its not a goatse.cx link.)
One of the cuter stories is that when they were searching for the perfect site on Puerto Rico, they took a dime and slid it around on a contour map of the island - and where it fit nicely inside the contours, there the dish went... Its amazing to look at, and I recommend a visit if you vacation in PR.
OTOH, your other point is completely correct - Arecibo only sees a limited range of the sky, and cannot view anything south of a certain declination (14? I forget). Not being able to see the Gal;actic center is particularly galling! That's why the new GBT (100m, unlike 305m at Arecibo, but the GBT is fully steerable) is so exciting.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Try OGR, the Optimal Golomb Ruler project. Finding better OGRs is actually a lot more clueful than brute-force cracking encryption keys (we've demonstrated that can be done, enough already!) - these interesting mathematical objects actually have many practical applications in comms, radio astronomy (so you are helping to find the LGMs) and other funky areas. And they even make beautiful necklaces....
Microsoft should integrate the SETI@Home client into their newest Office suite. Using Office the hardware is idle most of the times. CPU cycles are used better with the SETI@Home client.
I participate in Seti@Home, it seems more valuable than distributed.net's offering. However, I can see much better uses for such projects. A while ago I heard of the Casino-21 project, which is about climatic modelling. I think that this is something very useful, valuable and important to us, and I wish they would get a move on and start up. The web site of note for this project is: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/. At this time you can only register your interest (I think that they're still in the planning phase.) I do recommend that people register as higher numbers might increase the chances of the project happening. Presumably registering will also sign you up for future announcements, such as when they have client software to download. Although they make comparisons to SETI@Home, I think they will operate slightly differently, with work units perhaps taking more than a year (one of the things that I think makes SETI@Home successful is that people get feedback via wu completion, and get to compete).
"Why don't people assume *mundane* possibilities first?"
That should be obvious--because they're mundane! We don't want to see another boring glitch--we want aliens and space ships. We want to have bragging rights of, "I was there when it all started."
Excitement is...exciting! That's all there is to it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
> They haven't detected any Extra Terrestrials yet
We've got some spares, if that's what you're looking for.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Damn. After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative. Or maybe the underlying premise of SETI is flawed. Or our concept of communication is too primative for the advanced alien armada now flying towards us after seeing the final episode of M*A*S*H yesterday.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Measuring computing time in years doesn't mean anything; these "years" are mostly being done on slow, outdated machines like at my school, where the average time is about 26 hours (that includes some G4 cubes, Blue G3's, but mostly really old all-in-ones from 5 years ago). Some of the machines like Sun's team does one every five hours or so along with SGI, but most of the time is from us slowpokes, it doesn't track any real data analysis or progress.
# debian/rules
Keep in mind that the people running Seti@Home aren't sitting in Arecibo, PR with the dish. I would imagine when the dish goes down, the primary goal of the operators is to get it working again, not to call Berkeley and say, "hey guys, the dish is broken, just disregard all the garbage data we're collecting today."
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time? 500.000 years computing time on a 8086 is something entirely different than the same amount of computing time on an Athlon 1 GHz, so I don't really know what their statement is supposed to mean.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I don't understand the concept of a "close call". A "close call" would mean that an ET was out there and they almost detected it, or that they detected something and it was almost an ET.
A broken telescope is hardly a "close call", at least in this context.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A bunch of people get data from a central server, and all the computer analyze this data. In essence, what they're doing is cracking encryption.
I'm pretty sure I'm right on that, but I still don't understand why. Are you trying to find security loopholes? I think this is the point, in which case I find the whole project rather pointless - anyone who pools together millions of computers can crack encryption eventually. As an analogy... Imagine that you are testing a new computer for Mil Spec - it has to be extremely durable. I see Distributed.net as the equivalent of stacking up 40,000 tanks and dropping them all at once from a helicopter. Oh my gosh! You found a problem with the server. But in reality, who on earth is going to do it?!
Again, I might misunderstand - this project could be something that is done for "fun" (let's see who can crack the code quickest), or for more devious purposes... Please reply with your comments; I think I misunderstand the project.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
This guy is nuts, you're saying. But wait. What I'm saying is that the only "sane" alien society that would actually make the effort to contact us is one that wants to destroy us. And I don't think that's very likely either. You just can't advance to that stage without learning some very important lessons along the way. Lessons about war, peace, and morality. And don't forget that these "people" are completely self-sufficient. They don't work for a living like we do. They do work, of course, but only out of the desire to further their technological placement among other societies. In other words, they aren't out to destroy the earth just to confiscate our plutonium supply.
Now, suppose there really is an alien race intending to destroy us. Why haven't they done it yet? What are they waiting for? Discovering intelligent life, for an advanced species, does not involve exploration ala Star Trek. They automate it. If they do exist, they already know we're here.
So, what happens if there really is some form of communication floating around just waiting for us to discover it? I don't think it's likely at all. They wouldn't be that careless. They clean up after themselves. They generate no pollution, no tracks of where they've been.
Here is another reason. Imagine what kinds of technology these aliens use to communicate, given that they are capable of interspace communication. It ain't radio. In other words, we're trying to recieve smoke signals while they're using light, or black holes, or plasma, or who knows what.
The only way we could possibly make a discovery like that is if another society exists just like us; that is, at the same stage of technological evolution, within our range and with the same curiosity and motives as SETI.
For the record, I do believe that intelligent alien life exists. Absolutely. But I don't believe that we're going to find them anytime soon. Not until we've earned the right to.
> Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.
there are number of companies that are going to offer for pay project. you should check out following sites:
popular power: Research on influenza vaccination. has windows and gnu/linux clients. mac, solaris and *bsd clients about to be released soon. it has tim oreilly of o'reilly as board member.
parabon: Research on cancer treatment (chemotherapy). clients exist only for windows but they are going to release gnu/linux client soon. they are giving out 100$ on daily basis to random providers.
Dcypher/Processtree they have some kind of physics project. problem is that its easily to cheat on this project. they are also giving out 100$ to random users.
now to my conclusion. all of these projects are paying to little to warrant me donating my cpu time to them. many of them demands that you have 24/7 access to inet. this is something that is unnacaptable to large number of users in europe because we dont have flat rate, so i'll keep donating my cpu cycles to ogr project on dist.net
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
well difference between mac and gnu/linux is not as big as it might seem on first glance. for example on that list mac0s is mentioned 2 times while gnu/linux is mentioned 6 times. now if we add together all those units:
Macos: 22714077+73=22714150
GNU/Linux: 12672647+5929716+2269+1+1=18604642
now difference is not longer around 8 million units but 4 millions instead. with that many units linux moves into #4.
so linux users contribute 81% of what mac users contribute.
lets now take a look at another huge distributed project. distributed.net has around 500 000 users, of which 50 000 are active every day. ( i wonder how many active users / day seti@home has).
project OGR25
MacOS
macosX on powerPC is #14, rhapsody on powerPC is #16 and MacOS on powerPC is #4.
gnu/linux
linux on x86 is #2, linux on alpha is #12, linux on arm is #22, linux on MIPS is #24, linux on S390 is #30 and linux on sparc is #31.
that means that macos has 22 054 256 gnodes while linux has 108 845 111 gnodes. mac users contribute 19% of what linux users contribute.
this shows that doing linux client before mac client is actually smart choice by f@h.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Another option, in the "pure math" category, is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at www.mersenne.org.
I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.
At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower, etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).
I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?