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: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.

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."

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Re:Give them a way to keep score

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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.