SETI Institute Is Looking For a Few Good Algorithms

blackbearnh writes "For years, people have been using SETI@Home to help search for signs of extraterrestrial life in radio telescope data. But Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, wants to take things to the next level. Whereas SETI@Home basically used people's computers as part of a giant distributed network to run a fixed set of filters written by SETI researchers, Tarter thinks someone out there may have even better search algorithms that could be applied. She's teamed with a startup called Cloudant to make large volumes of raw data from the new Allen telescope available, and free Amazon EC2 processing time to crunch the data. According to Tarter: 'SETI@Home came on the scene a decade ago, and it was brilliant and revolutionary. It put distributed computing on the map with such a sexy application. But in the end, it's been service computing. You could execute the SETI searches that were made available to you, but you couldn't make them any better or change them. We'd like to take the next step and invite all of the smart people in the world who don't work for Berkeley or for the SETI Institute to use the new Allen Telescope. To look for signals that nobody's been able to look for before because we haven't had our own telescope; because we haven't had the computing power.'"

Comments

If (signal eq '6EQUJ5')

[Anonymous Coward]

print "WOW!"

According to Claude Shannon...

[arc86]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. I remembered hearing this in school so I searched and found this paper.

As I understand SETI has always been searching for narrowband signals in the past. But our technology is moving toward spread spectrum signals for more efficient use of bandwidth, making our transmissions appear more like noise to anyone who doesn't know the encoding scheme. Aliens could be doing/have done the same. So good luck, scientists!

Re:According to Claude Shannon...

[should_be_linear]

I guess we will also in 100 years or so realize that we emit nothing but noise, and short distance one for that matter (Wi-Fi, some future gen). So, if we want to be visible to potential neighbors, we must establish "pulsing station", which emits something intelligent and easily detectable, like prime numbers. But it is unlikely it will be old fashioned radio signal. It is probably hard to detect from such distances because it is destroyed by objects on its way (stars, galaxies, small objects, gas, whatever). Maybe neutrinos, such pulse could pass trough everything on its way, and maybe there is way to pickup that broadcast somehow on the other side (if there is, they will know how). So, maybe it is just to early for this sort of projects, there is homework on inter-galactic broadcast to do, and one that actually make sense, not analog TV.