Interview with SETI@home Director David Anderson

CowboyRobot writes "ACM's Queue magazine interviews David P. Anderson, a research scientist at the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, who directs the SETI@home and BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects. SETI@home uses hundreds of thousands of home computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. FTA: "volunteer computing arose because projects such as SETI@home needed $100 million worth of computing power but didn't have the money. But there's no free lunch--a project must give participants something in return for their computer time.""

Comments

How about a free probing?

[Datagod]

When you find the aliens, perhaps give all the Seti@home volunteers a good probing?

Re:How about a free probing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all fun and games until the aliens get fed up with us spamming them, and you don't want to be on the wrong side of their spam blocker.

Re:Patent Rights

[Waffle Iron]

I'll take a share of any items that they patent as a result of SETI.

I'm betting that any goodies we get out of the deal, like warp drives and matter replicators, have already been patented by the aliens. They'll probably be expecting royalties.

Re:Give them a way to keep score

[DurendalMac]

The way a lot of the SETI competitors see it, they get a bigger e-pecker in return for their number crunching efforts.

Re:Power usage?

[Charly_Kuehnast]

Nobody needs SETI. If you're looking for a real challenge, try to find intelligent life on this planet[1].

Charly

[1] And no, mice don't count.

Re:Strange signal?

[Anonymous Coward]

*If I were a cusser I'd write "TFA," but I'm not so I didn't just write that

Straigten up and quit thinking the word fine is a bad word. Yes it is derogatory to say that is a fine woman but it is not in refrence to The Fine Article; unless of course there is a new line of seperatists articles liberals on the horizon.

How Timely

[ipxodi]

How timely considering Seti@home has been offline for a week and all the users have this really keen "Boinc is currently idle" floating screensaver.
Maybe they've been hacked by Aliens who didn't want to be discovered.
"I for one welcome our new alien hacker overlords."

.

New Project

[Anonymous Coward]

I am actually starting project called waldo@home. It will require $100 million worth of computing power to find waldo.

Anyone want in?

K.

Re:New Project

[Peldor]

First I need to know if it's available in a BeOS version I can run from a bootable USB drive preferably in Sanskrit.

I can't just go donating my computer time to anybody who comes up with a project.

Re:Give them a way to keep score

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

It seems that many of us are competitive enough to donate cpu time and only get back a scorecard.

How about using the MMORPG method of rewarding participants. Have SETI members level up after certain of work units. "I'm a level 42 SETI warrior!" Or maybe have SETI members find "rare" artifacts. "I have the sword of Cocconi!"

I can't understand how my nephew will play WOW for an entire weekend to change a number from 47 to 48.

Re:Give them a way to keep score

[Manfre]

My friends and I had a competition over who had the most seti points. It boiled down to which one of us was in charge of a better network.

I confess: Jodie Foster made me do it

[somewhat_distant]

My reason for running SETI: If I find ET, maybe, just maybe I might have a chance to meet Jodie Foster. I'm sure some math genius out there can work it the statistics (close to zero), but in a Dumb & Dumber kind of way... I still have a chance..