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."
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
I think the milestone is the half-billionth result, rather than actual contact with ET, tho with all the celebrating I'd do if I made first contact, I think that $500 might just about cover my nights alcohol purchases ;)
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 --
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.
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.
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!
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
> what next?
Well, assuming we run out of data to process and methods to process it (yeah, right), or you get bored, or decide it's pointless, there are plenty of other projects to go to.
Folding@Home and Genome@Home are two related projects with open results and which will probably have client source available sometime.
Check a list of distributed projects. There's plenty of choice.
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
the movie and book rights, plus revenues from public speaking by the individual who finds ET
Yeah, that'd be a thrilling movie, book, speech. Basically:
day 1: checked my computer, no result
day 2: checked my computer, no result
day 254: checked my computer, screensaver turned off... turned it back on, disaster averted, no result.
day 675: checked my computer, no result
day 676: checked my computer, n.... hold on... no, that's nothing, no result
etc, etc
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.
Once I got my pretty 10000 unit certificate, and 9/11 realigned my priorities, I lost interest and removed all of my running clients.
If I may ask, which priorities were those, that prompted you to take that action?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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....
Granted, the majority of these numbers are made up, but I would venture that they're on the conservative side.
I would venture that f1=0, but of course you'd say I'm crazy.
"Tell a man that there are four hundred billion stars, and he'll believe you. Say a bench has wet paint, and he has to touch it."
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
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)
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.
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
Better still is the Kids In The Hall's take on it:
"We've been anally probing for years now, and the only thing we've found is that 1 in 10 of them don't really mind it that much!"
I thought hollywood glorified the gnome project in that movie "Antitrust"...
Got friends?
No no no, he's projecting a religious statement.
Just try to ignore it.
Wow. I suppose you're the first person to actually _solve_ the drake equation. So according to your 'conservative' calculations All other terms other than the three you notes have 100% probability.
Think about it. The universe is aprroximately 19 billion years old. Let's give 9 billion years for the universe to cool and stars to form to allow any sort of civilization to begin. Now civilization on earth has been here approximately 100 000 years, and we've only had radio technology to detect space signals within the last 100 years. That's 0.000000001% of the age of the universe we've had this ability to check. What's the chance of aliens sending out signals at this same time? We are not going to get any signals anytime soon.
Seti@home is great because it shows us the _potential_ of distributive computing. The people are in hands of the most powerful computer in the world, not governments. We may not find aliens with this, but honestly who really thought we would?
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!
Try the new find/bin/laden@home client, which
operates on masses of spy statellite data to find
bin laden life signs and thermal signiture.
Or the new fight/bin/laden@home client which compares masses of possible viral DNA sequences
to produce one targeted to kill Bin Laden while
not affecting anyone else.
A. Folding is owned by Stanford Uni.
B. I'm more than happy to have any company, person or organisation that can cure my dads prostate cancer, being very rich indeed.
C. Someone else being rich, doesn't make you poor.
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.
Just infinity more weeks and wel'll have contacted ET!
Fan-tastic
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
As written in another post, the results of their science is going to be made available for free. If I knew that a single huge and rich medical company was the only ones that was going to benefit from the project, I would never have been running their client. They can buy themselves an expensive supercomputer to do their research then. That is fortunately not the case here, however, but if I'm doing something for free, then I want the possible benefits from the results to be available for free also. I'm doing this to help science and that should be available to everyone.
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 Half-Billionth and the body says 500 millionth. Makes sense to me.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
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.
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