OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

[sven]

Cool, didn't know about that group, I'll join and push you over the 20k mark

[zen.]

I'm in.

zen

[sachmo]

That is so cool!

[rdouglass]

Cool! Zenbudo and sven pushed us over the 20K mark w/ plenty of room to spare!!! However I don't think the page has completely updated its' calculations.

If anyone hasn't checked out Seti@Home, take a look. It is (as sachmo says) cool!!!

I personally have quite a few work units myself. In fact someone here on another thread suggested I was "heating my house" with it (with all the spare CPU's I have running the process).. Reguardless, most if not all that visit these forums probably have some interest in SETI......

[Timstone]

I've seen the page now and I don't understand what they mean. What do they mean with 20000+ year cpu time? And what do you mean with plenty room to spare? Please explain.

[rdouglass]

It may be better for you to start out at the home page:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.html

Basically Seti@Home is an attempt at discovering ET by analysing radio frequencies across the sky (the web pages do a much better and more thorough job explaining it). Then, breaking up all that data into approx. 330K chunks and distributing a chunk to one of several million participating computers for analysis (1 chunk = 1 "Work Unit"). The remote computers do the analysis (Fast Fourier Transforms, etc.) to look for signs of ET, then return the results and recieve a new chunk for data crunching.

On the page I posted, "Results Recieved" is a count of completed Work Units (or chunks), "Total CPU Time" is (obviously) how long your computer(s) took to process thosw work units, and "Average" is pretty self-explainitory.

"Plenty of room to spare" is just that the group is actually well over 20K work units (not currently displayed but should be updated soon).

[dogscoff]

Just looked at the link at the start of the thread. who wrote this?

Space Empires is a strategy game, similar to the board game Version of Risk.

Similar to Risk? Like a Space Shuttle is similar to a canoe...