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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 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...
Let's try reading that again, shall we? reward for the user who returns the milestone result They are talking about the person who returns the 500 millionth result, not the person who finds ET.
That's awfully convienient. There is no time between may and june.
Disregarding the fact that the original message is about returning the 500 millionth result, not about finding ET: If you're in S@h for fame, you're in it for the wrong reason.
When your computer 'finds' ET, it's not going to do anything out of the ordinary. You'll send back a workunit with a triplet, spike, gaussian, whatever... and other people will likely return the same workunit. Only after further, intense investigation and scrutiny by the people running S@h will ET be 'found'. I'm pretty sure *they* will get all the credit, since they did more than just let someone borrow their computer.
I'm sorry if this turns anyone off to SETI@home. I firmly believe it is a project worth participating in - just don't delude yourself.
-J
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
You're taking the average over the RC5-64 project, which has been over 1600 days, meaning you're looking at the computing power available to this particular project, some 600 - 700 days ago or so.
Use my suggestion to add in the seti@home users' computational power, then add in a rough estimate of net users gained over the life of the project, then apply moore's law to compute the addition of faster cpus, and you'll be able to calculate the most likely time for completion (assuming say, 60% keyspace searched, which takes the average 1/2 and ads 10% for overhead). If you can do the math on that one, you're a better man (or woman) than I, but I'll bet you it'd be MUCH sooner than you think to complete the project. Assume it should take roughly 10 years (just for argument's sake) your average computational power would lie I believe somewhere around the 7th or 8th year. I could be a bit off on this, it's 2am and I've been up about 28 hours now. I think I need sleepy time.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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
The only difference it is that if I unfold the "right" protein, some corporation will get my money, compared with the seti case, where just the "right" people will know when the messages will be detected.
:-).
Guess what, I'm still looking for ET