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."
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 ;)
By my calculations based on Seti's stats from the last 24 hours the 500 millionth result will be reached in 3.67 days.
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...
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
yeah but one way or the other SETI@home is better, if we find alliens they might show us not only how to cure diseas but also boost us by several 100 years worth of research in other fields like physics etc. and on the other hand if they're destructive and (well duh...) destroy us, then we don't have to worry about disease! didn't that make ur day?
--tzan
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
Yeah, but you know that the first sign of alien "intelligence" that we find is going to be the intersteller version of "MAKE MONEY FAST".
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
> 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
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....
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
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
Actually I think there is quite a bit at risk. The discovery of intelligent life possibly more intelligent than us could cause some severe religious, social and governmental problems.
For religious types it might mean they have to redefine and reinterpret their texts. It could even be worse for religions if the message we receive says something like "Nice to see you are coming along. We wondered how long it would take our genetic experiment to mature this far along."
Socially it could easily become an "us vs. them" mentality where we stand more unified. This would be a good thing. Perhaps many disputes would resolve very quickly. Perhaps not.
For governments it could be troubling because now we are faced with a potential new threat. Especially if they are far more technically advanced. Do we make contact? What if they want to colonize because their planet just got creamed by a supernova? More to the point, what if they check out our DNA and find us to be an alarming mixture of intelligence and animalism to the point of us being the killer bees of the galaxy? I know this isn't necessarily likely but imagine their disposition. Here is an intelligent species that uses technology at every turn as a weapon.
Anyway, enough rambling. I hope my point is clear.
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"
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
Saying that somebody sucks because they prefer Seti instead of F@H is lame IMHO. Far from everyone can run the F@H client simply because of their configuration. The F@H client more or less needs an "always on" internet connection, you can run it on a modem connection, but I personally wouldn't. In that case I would be run a different project, maybe the G@H project (the sister project to F@H), more info can be found on the Team Primordial Soup website.
It also depends on what kind of OS you are using. The F@H project has clients for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Yes, that is what most people uses, but it still leaves out a lot of people. Another project, similar to the F@H project is the Distributed Folding Project. It has clients for a lot of platforms and the science is good. You can find more info and a lot of links on the Ars Technica Team Stir Fry website which is the team I'm crunching for.
I personally prefer projects like F@H and Distributed Folding because they potentially could lead to the discovery of new drugs for cancer and other terrible diseases which we currently have no cure for.