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First Pulsar Discovery By an @Home Project
pq writes "In a paper published today (abstract) in Science, astronomers are reporting the discovery of a radio pulsar in data acquired at the world's largest radio telescope and analyzed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in 192 countries for the Einstein@Home project. This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project, and specific credit is being given to Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt of Germany." The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing is hard to swallow; there are quite a few distributed projects out there, several of which have reported positive results, such as the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne number.
Judging by Folding@Home's long list of results I'd say they would also dispute the 'first scientific discovery' claim.
While not distributed computing, this isn't even the first crowdsourced scientific discovery; Galaxy Zoo discovered something so weird that people are still trying to figure out what it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp
Oh wait, it was claimed in something that wasn't the Title, which I guess makes me as stupid as the submitter.
que sera sera.
The enemies of Democracy are
I disagree. SETI@home has discovered that they can get many people to use their personal computational power and electricity to process random signals in a vague hope of discovering intelligent life.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
Is it really sad that distributed computing is so commonplace that it's resulting in discoveries in fields as disperse as biochemistry, abstract mathematics, and astronomy? That sounds like... the opposite of sad. Something went from being new and exciting but small scale to massive and available to many, and now many more projects are able to exploit it. That sounds exciting to me.
Sure Foldit is more interesting and exciting from the technological development standpoint. Is this some kind of zero-sum game where that necessarily means it eats up the excitement points of discovering pulsars with "traditional" distributed computing projcets?
The enemies of Democracy are
A Mersenne number is any integer of the form 2^n - 1. If this number happens to be prime, it is called a Mersenne prime. The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Nothing in the abstract or the linked article makes any claims of being the first any discovery. All this is about is that this particular project had its first hit. The rest is just sensationalist nonsense from the summary writer.
One of the things that wasn't talked much about in the press conference was that the software heavily utilizes the GPU over the CPU when compatible hardware exists. I meant to bring it up somehow, but I was happy to be done and off camera after an hour. Media events, while interesting, require a lot of sitting still, being quiet, and not sneezing.
Yes, the technology for doing distributed computing is now over ten years old and I was a very early adopter. So as some people pointed out that's not new 'news' anymore per say. What is computationally newer is that the projects now don't just expand at Moore's law's rate anymore and as GPUs get better it will increase much faster for the next few years until leveling off at some new growth rate. Yes I know other things have been found, but finding a pulsar was really cool. Speaking with the scientists and science media all over the world and seeing the full international scope of this project over the last few weeks was also fascinating.