Slashdot Mirror
SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result
Jonathan writes: "SETI@Home, the largest distributed computing project in the world, is on the verge of receiving its 500 millionth result. This is a major milestone for both the project and distributed computing as a whole. Oh, and if you still need some added incentive to get involved, there's a $500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result."
I would have thought that the movie and book rights, plus revenues from public speaking by the individual who finds ET would make that $500 look pretty paultry by comparison.
Ok, now all you folks staring at the pretty screensaver really ought to be cracking keys for Distributed.net.
If everyone just jumped on RC5, we'd have the 128-bit key done by now, and ET would still be there waiting for us. If you're going to talk to aliens, shouldn't you at least let them know your computer can brute force a 128-bit encrypted RC5 key? If that doesn't impress them, nothing will. Once they see that, they'll probably show us the secrets of interstellar travel, and eternal life, things like that. But only if we crack keys first, so go download the Dnetc client and get cracking!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
$500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result. ;)
lol, I bet the winner is some guy who just signed up for the project the day before - the SETI@Home version of a Slashdot first post
Has SETI posted any *real* results yet, or is it just a waste of time and CPU cycles?
Wonder what the chances to win are compared to something like the lottery.
Seti@Home's Bandwidth Problems.
i thought @Home was dead?
seti@home run for 3 years.. after burn out zillion CPU.. what next?
mayb we can find actual pi value..
Now that E.T. has returned to the theatres maybe seti will finally get some respect.
By my calculations based on Seti's stats from the last 24 hours the 500 millionth result will be reached in 3.67 days.
The real question is, what have they learned from their project, not only as far as life in outer space is concerned, but also in the terms of such a large distributed computing project? It seems like this would be a great thing for NPO's to get involved in, to solve other problems such as global warming, and the problem which I think we will all agree is the most important, how to pour hot grits down Natalie Portman's naked petrified pants?
if you want to learn more about distributed computing there is great article that describes various types of distributed computing and how distributed computing works.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Once I got my pretty 10000 unit certificate, and 9/11 realigned my priorities, I lost interest and removed all of my running clients.
Best of luck to the winner. If you get "taken" I call shotgun!
Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.
Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.
I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...
Kevin Fox
I consider SETI@Home to be one of the most inspirational projects ever attempted by our generation. Really, it's my equivalent of the moon shot (which happened two years before I was born).
I don't get misty-eyed very easily, but when I think about the films of JFK's inspirational speech... well, I hope the Kleenex is handy.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.
God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.
modern choral music...
Folding@home is actually trying to help cure diseases. Seti@home is chasing noises in space. I would much rather cure the diseases personally.
It's for the user who returns the 500 billionth result, not the one who "finds ET".
is when someone intercepts the communication from beginning on, and fakes a client to the server and a server to the client, since the protocol, as described in the article, allows anyone that receives, or intercepts the messages from beginning on, to create a fake other side, and construct an impersonator for the server of the other side.
This would be done simply by replying to the server with the fake clients guesses, and establish an authemticated connection with it. To the other client, at the same time, one would transmit a random sequence just as the server would, and reply , just as the server would. The sequence is not identical, it doesnt have to be: the client has no way of knowing.
If this major flaw is not corrected (it might be already), the system has no possible way of creating a secure enviroment.
--------------------
I listen to dune, do you?
I listen to dune, do you?
the person that didnt quite read the news post gets a +1.
way to go
Misleading? Would anyone really read that and think that they were about to discover the 500 millionth E.T.?
And why they shouldn't be proud of the results they've achieved so far? Is it somehow SETI's fault that there aren't more alien civilizations out there broadcasting signals in ways we can detect?
-Who were the first 499,999,999 E.T.s discovered? I seem to have missed out on the fanfare and parades.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The SETI project is such a waste of computer power. Using that power to find new drugs to fight cancer or other diseases with the United Devices project is much more reasonable. http://www.ud.com/
Everyone who wants to get packets done fast should run this version. I upgraded from a 400mhz PII/128MB RAM/Voodoo Banshee 16mb/Win 98 to Athlon XP 1700+/256MB RAM/Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB/Win 2k and saw no significant improvement. I tried the command line version and cut time per packet down by 83%.
Maybe you won't see as much improvement as me, but you'll definitely see some, I guarantee.
Chris
Since some guy on Regis and Kelly predicted that a major UFO sighting will happen sometime between May and June!
anal probe?
Actually i am hoping for an all expense paid trip to an allien zoo, where i will have to live naked with a supermodel, and we will fuck for the education and entertainment of the aliens. (thanx for the fantasy kurt vonnegut, you are the best)
video files so I can burn them as VCDs.
Also I think that I read in scientific american that the odds of
them actually finding anything are VERY VERY small.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. A Mersenne Prime is of the form 2^x-1. Five have been found so far through GIMPS.
If it's money you want, it's $100,000 to the GIMPS for the first person who can catch a ten million digit prime number, and then split up according to the rules on this page.
If it's nobility you want, the money is awarded by the EFF to spur on cooperative computing.
BTW, it was a Slashdot story that clued me in in the first place.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All that work done, all to accomplish nothing at all. Other than flinging pseudoscientific displays on a lot of people's computer screens.
"Result" is generally associated with a specific outcome. In this case, the result was failure, all 500,000,000 times. They specifically state their goal is to find extraterrestrial life, and not meeting that goal results in failure. All 500,000,000 times.
We make contact, at long last with extra-terrestrial life,and they give us the untold secrets of, beyond all other things, pouring hot grits down natalie portmans petrified pants. Think of the possibilities. This could be the single most world shaping event in the history of all time.
I've crunched a lot of packets, but I can' get into my account anymore. I forgot my password and have long since used a different email address, so have no chance of getting it back. I'd start over, but it just seems like so far to go just to get back up the where I was...
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
For those interested in a not-hardcore-but-still-technical look into Seti@Home, I wrote an overview of it awhile back.
Disregard the misdated quotes that "the world's fastest computer runs at 2 teraflops," and it's still a good read :)
It all goes downhill from first post
Any word on when they're gonna find the Klingon chicks yet?
Don't think of it as failing to find E.T., but rather as succeeding in checking off one more place where E.T. isn't.
After all, I think I can say with some certainty that we'll find what we're looking for in the last place we look!
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I know, I know... I'm a pathetic coward.
Hey, you can also get a SETI@home t-shirt if you submit that 500 millionth result. =)
I suggest that in the interest of energy conservation, that seti@home switch to using
an equally effective Ouija Board. Super energy efficient
I'm posting this to ensure that everyone here is aware that there's a "Team Slashdot" group on SETI@home. Click here to see the latest team results. This team is actually not far away from reaching the one-millionth result.
By the way, I'm ranked #174. Kewl. :)
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Amen, get going on RC5 ppl!!!
Though, I'm almost convinced we missed the real key and we're gonna have to start all over we're so close.
And distributed.net gives those crappy 386's in your basement something better to do than look for ET in there're random dust covered bits.
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
chances are that the aliens are not even using this "gap" for communication ... and we are having our computer cruch tons of random number :) The aliens are probably using some form of communication unknown to us ... Who know if the aliens are even trying to communicate with us?
Omg, those fuckers are in my peyote garden again. Little green bastards and take that unicorn fetus singing frank zappa songs with you.
I see that the distributed computer base has a performance of 34TeraFLOPS. The amazing this is that Japan's new supercomputer can do 35 TFLOPS. You could hook that baby up to SETI@Home and instantly double its performance! Add the 20 fastest American supercomputers and you'd triple it. Scary stuff...
Anyway, I figure that in my lifetime (I'm 25 now), I'll see a desktop PC that can do 35TFLOPS. Can't wait!
And yet they still haven't done dick all in way of contacting an ET. Way to waste your CPU cycles and bandwidth, guys.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
That's a quote from Alexander Smith, by the way. I think it's true. People are likening the SETI@home project to a noble challenge that citizens should be rallying behind, as if it's the "race to the moon" of the present day. Well, I'll tell you... I'm 100% behind the concept and philosophy of SETI@home and I've dedicated many a CPU-year to it. But let's face it... we can't "lose" and nothing is really on the line here. Where's the glory in it if there's no guts risked?
:-P
Well, unless you count burned fingers on the heatsink of an overclocked SETI@home machine.
...and still nothing to show for it. :(
Oh well, at least it looks cool on my screen. =)
There are so many things that the government could use our money for that actually have a benefit to society. The odds of the existence of another life form that could return our communications are virtually zero. Remember this article? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/15/154322 4&mode=thread
~j
Thank you Dave Raggett
Except Los Alamos isn't in Nevada.
Good luck trying to log on, create a new account or connect. I haven't been able to connect via the Seti Client for quite a while.
I find it odd that after being hit with waves of terrestrial trojans like Code Red and Melissa, we still think it's kewl to connect the planetary computer network to the sky via a radio-telescope.
What we're hoping for is to find the big IRC in the sky. Careful what you wish for--those aliens might me more than just chatty. If they're ever-so-much more intelligent than us, think of the viruses some of them must be writing....
Discovered any evidence of alien life yet?
If you are willing to accept that the SETI@Home client actually does what they say it does and the same goes for the protein folding, then there is one difference between the two projects that, IMHO, can make one want to run the former but not the latter.
If one or more result is found from SAH (i.e., signal of intelligent origin found), the result isn't "owned" by anyone nor would it be likely to be withheld for any sort of gain by the party that holds the answer. The SAH team could hardly claim a result has been found and NOT reveal the coordinates without causing a riot. No, if they get a result, they'll release the coordinates, after which time everything on Earth that's big, round, and concave is going to be pointed in that direction, and then scientists all around the world will all have the same raw signal data from which they can draw conclusions.
On the other hand, the protein folding results can be used for any number of purposes for the gain of the people who have the information. And, if the protein folding project could lead to curing diseases, is it not reasonable that it could also be used to CAUSE them, accidentally or deliberately? There's an inscrutability and opacity to the PF project that the SAH project doesn't have.
This is what has kept me from running the PF client (aside perhaps from lack of a Linux client if that is in fact still the case) - the feeling that my computers might wind up making, say, Glaxo-Wellcome twenty times bigger than Microsoft.
The moral is, never try. --Homer
Here is the answer that 500 million of the results provided: 500,000,000 * "no".
Create a SETI look-alike that pretends to run for a week or two and then flashes in huge letters across the screen:
**ET Life Detected**
Put that on somebody's computer who runs SETI...wheee!
Are they under my bed? Nope.
Are they in my closet? Nope.
Are they in my pants? Nope.
Are they in the drier? Nope.
Are they in my corn field? Nope.
Only 499,999,995 more places and I'll tie SETI@home!
These guys make a pretty good case that it might be.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But this is just another cynical bastard's perspective, certain to be modded out of the viewing range of everybody here. Nobody likes being told their efforts are useless.
The odds of a lot of important discoveries were "very very small".
The good news: We found E.T. transmissions.
The bad news: They were broadcasting material that violated the DMCA.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
If they are really that advanced, they have no MS in their society, and therefore can no longer fathom the thought of "viruses".
Or, it could be like Independence Day, where the alien society obviously never had script kiddies so our 1337 virus technology will screw them over and allow a few F18s to blow the hell out of them...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
.5 gigaunits is huge. Congratulations SETI. But I think that just 1 ET would, ironically, be about a million times bigger!
...is United Devices cancer research.
SETI@Home and DNet are both interesting, but I think UD is a lot more constructive. There is a great potential in harboring this kind of computing power and directing it towards something like cancer research.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if SETI@Home got something back from god knows where, but it would be even better if clients like UD aided in finding the right mixes of drugs that could, one day, cure cancer.
This topic really made the moderators wield the redundant, offtopic and troll sticks :p
It's interesting how much data has been processed... equivalent to nearly 18 months worth of full time cycles on the fastest computer in the world!! That's quite an achievement in itself.
Personally I agree distributed computing for (PUBLIC) medical research is probably of more benefit to humanity, at least short to medium term.
Sure we could find aliens who know the cure to all these diseases, but if thats the case they would be beyond using radio communication, thus we couldn't find them with SETI anyway :p
Considering how Seti has more people than it can handle and last I heard people are doing redudant blocks not just for error checking but just to keep the clients busy.
The intel/united devices program doesn't have as many participants and you get the added bonus of joining AMDzone's team (ranked #3) just to show Intel what you think of their pricing/products.
Click.
How many /.ers are going to run over and start up a client in order to get 500 bucks. I realize not everyone is going to run over but it will be interesting to see if there is a spike in there productivity. I stopped doing seti@home a while ago, when the reports of small amounts of data came out. I went back to dnet, but I still did more than 85% of the people...
If i get the loot I will donate half of it to the GNU foundation...
Douglas Calvert
I thought hollywood glorified the gnome project in that movie "Antitrust"...
Got friends?
Parallel computing flops are more expensive than distributed computing flops, so you're comparing apples and oranges. Interesting comparison nonetheless.
As seen in Independance Day, alien processors are Macintosh compatible. As long as you stay on x86 technology and disable macros in MicroSpace Office, you're safe.
All the homeowners that I work with say they spend $150-200 per month on electricity. At least with SETI you are using the floating point cycles in your CPU that are otherwise wasted unless you watch DVDs or compile programs a lot. You WASTE far more electricity watching the mindless crap on your TV.
This article made me to install the client at last. I am sure there are many people like me who were just lazy to do this earlier. /. effect.
For once, a positive
not like it's a notable discrepency...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Hehege. Just watch it be my year and a half over due 3rd data set.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
The most important reason to do anything:
TO GET LAID. Or Lei'd. Hawaii is damn nice this time of year.
Sorry- I'm going to Kaua'i in a few weeks. It's all about being leid.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Likewise, I first heard about it in a slashdot story.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I had Seti running constantly for over 2 years... but there are a lot of other projects I'd like to help out on as well.
But neither one plays nice with the others.
While I wish there was some "master program" which these distributive projects could plug into fact is on a Wintel machine you can seemingly only run one to any benefit....
And if I gotta choose, I'll take fighting cancer..
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
How do we know that SETI @Home isn't a cunning alien plot to gain control of all our PCs so that they can take over the world?
I bags the film-rights!
By your news item you seem to be suggesting all get onboard and process some work-units for the $500, rather than do them to help in the common goal.
What I can see now happening is a mass download and sign-up and increase of the current SETI@Home's bandwidth problems. Also you have increased the chances of someone who may process 2 or 3 units to get the money, plus never do any more than someone who has been giving up their CPU time for years getting a small windfall.
Shame on you Slashdot and the story submitter!!!
If they're that smart... then they'd realize we're only capable of radio astronomy at this point. We're all assuming they want to be discovered anyway. Perhaps they are shy aliens.
...and the aliens will be carrying balloons and a check for, oddly enough, $500...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
but is this the thread where I can read spoilers about this week's episode of The X-Files? :)
is anyone else disturbed by the fact that the recommended windows user download is 666KB...?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
"...the peak performance is 40TFLOPS (executing performance is over 5TFLOPS)..."
It's not so easy to get that machine to it's top performance.
Most scientests believe that if an alien race is out ther(I personally think there is) they would probably be using a setup different than what we could understand. so basically the SETI@HOME setup makes a nice screen saver and thats all. With all the people using it they have logged craploads of years(I haven't checking a while so I don't want to give a false ammount) and yet we still don't have ET knocking on our doors. Does using SETI@HOME actually DO anything besides use big words and pretty colours? My personal belief is no it doesent.
Awesome for Seti@Home. I have been active with them for years now. I enjoy distributed project. I also enjoy Grub a distributed search engine project.
It is already something, that it's nothing. But that is everything.
... or Fermi pardox ... and abandon the faith.
Read Rare Earth
Or see www.kurzweilAI.net
p.s.
The distributed computing is a great thing. The final result of the SETI project.
Just infinity more weeks and wel'll have contacted ET!
Fan-tastic
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd rather find the next OGR.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
All I think about when I hear that quote is how badly JFK pronounced decade. He made it sound like decayed. Although, isn't there a tradition about not being able to speak English with US Presidents...? ;-)
Oh, and just to complete this troll... the Russians won the Space Race. Space shots. Pfft. Definition: going really, really high in a washing machine and splashing down somewhere wet. OK, ok, the USA won the Moon Race... maybe. Or was Capricorn One based on a true story?
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Trying to brute-force the protein folding problem is like trying to brute force arrive at the idea of branch path prediction, register windows, and peephole optimization by examining Windows executables.
Perhaps this is true with "real world" adventures -- climbing mountains, fighting battles, sailing across uncharted seas.
However, it is totally evident that this comment is meaningless when it comes to accomplishments of the intellect. Einstein didn't risk his life (though perhaps he did stake his career) on the development of General Relativity, but does that remove one iota from the genuine beauty of his theory? The same holds true for accomplishment in all spheres of human intellectual achievement : the sciences, the arts and humanities, and so on. You may argue that it is the "revolutionaries" who inevitably make the greatest discoveries by risking careers and reputations, yet history demonstrates that at least as often, the revolutionaries are purely accidental (ie, Rutherford backscattering, the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, etc.) Yet the accidental nature of the discovery does not tarnish the significance of their results in any manner whatsoever.
seti@home is a scientific mission. You simply cannot judge it on the same basis as scaling a mountain. It is a comparison of apples and oranges, and entirely misses the point of an intellectual achievement. Believe me, if seti@home actually discovers a genuine signal, it will rank among the greatest discoveries of the century, if not of scientific history.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
This isn't like RSA; you haven't hit half the search space when you hit 500,000,000 results. Statistically, a "catch" is no closer or further away than it ever was.
This is seriously fictitious milestone: it's only meaningful to humans, who think it's a large number, and who think it has more significance than other large numbers because they happen to have 10 fingers.
-- Terry
6 repeatable candidate signals
0 verified ET's
Yeah, they seem to be doing quite well :)
Is there a project with wich I could donate my cycles to help developing countries?
ro see all the perl scripts running to get the result and earn $500 to the best perl programmer :)
And with that loot, RMS could finally get all of the fleas and ticks out of his unkempt stinking beard!
What distributed project do you run?
.... none and some crap about cowboy neal :)
Dnet, Seti,
I thought it had something to do with "search for extraterresterial Intelligence" - untill it finds THAT, there are NO results, or the results are all comming in negative, "we've thoroughly sifted thru a bunch of space noise and haven't found ET yet!".
This is like giving an award out to a gold miner who has processed 1 million buckets of mud and still hasn't struck gold.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The subject says billion and the body says million. SETI's site says million.
considering the huge amount of calculation,
and the ethical problem related to a public vs private
approach to DNA knowledge,
why the SETI model of computation cannot be applied here?
Hey, if you wanted half a billion zeros, I could write you a simple program for that! Isn't zero all that has resulted from this program? I mean noone has found intelligent life right?
10 PRINT 0
20 GOTO 10
And wait...... and wait.........
... is that none of it has ever tried to contact us.
Calvin and Hobbes
It is possible to run more than one client on on PC at the same time. What would you like to do?
As an example, you can easily run the Distributed Folding client, the F@H client, the Distributed.net client and others together. In fact a lot of people in the DC community run 2 clients, a primary client and a secondary client as backup if the primary client for some reason fails.
It is possible to set the priority of a lot of the clients with ex. a commandline switch or something or in a configuration file. If you want to support two projects, it's a matter of tweaking the priority to make each client get ~50% CPU time. You would help more if you bought another box and put a client on each, though ;)
Regarding the "master program" - I know a person who is in fact working on exactly such a piece of software. Some of the clients already kinda have that feature - the Distribute.Net client have 2 projects running, the UD client also have had 2 projects running and I know that Stanford are working on a client that combines F@H and G@H.
In regards to fighting cancer, I believe you are thinking about UD. I personally don't like the way that project is managed. When you install the client, you give them the right to automatically update the client whenever they choose to do so and unless you configure it to do differently, it will also work on other projects besides the cancer project. That is why I currently prefer the Distributed Folding Project - it's a great project (good medical science) and they care a lot about users privacy and security.
"...the largest distributed computing project in the world..."
Shouldn't it be "this" world? =)
jrbd
There is NO money spent on SETI whatsoever by the Government at the time. They used to but they stopped the funding back in the 80s when they were planning to launch the so-called "Star-Wars" Project. That was one major reason to start SETI@home in the first place. And what i spend my personal CPU-cycles and money for is my business. Of course i respect your point that there are terrible problems on earth that need solving but in fact there are many other distributed projects that take care of it. Blaming Seti for the ignorance on earth is not exactly what solves the problem.
nom,
Lispy
Please folks, just turn those machines off.
The distributed.net folks have made their point. A lot of machines can be used in parallel to break encryption that most people thought was infeasable.
The SETI, Folding, Kazza, primes, etc., folk learned from dNet that they could tap a huge resource for only the cost of development, but this is a terribly inefficient way to do parallel computation.
Think of all the coal or natural gas that's being converted into sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, plus hundreds of other nasty things you don't want to be breathing.
Our culture seems to be embracing a tragedy called "Life Without Consequences."
Wake up! That P90 you have in the corner running a pretty screensaver is using 250W/hr. It's connected to wires that run hundreds of miles, ending at a enormous motor powered by BURNING STUFF. Just because the consequences are hidden out of sight doesn't mean they don't exist. The irony of distributed computing is that all those machines doing a little work are connected back to just a FEW power plants, and that work is NOT being done free from consequences.
We must be searching for extraterrestrial intelligence because intelligence is so hard to find right here on earth.
-pmb
So its better for me to pump 1000W through a apartment-wide heater in the other room to heat my room than to use about 350W to produce the same effect and a bonus 8.8 Mkeys/s?
"All I do is eat and poop!" -- Bean
What a pity it does not wrap around its uptime in 498 days like my linux/x86 machine.