OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

Ragnarok · #1 November 11th, 2002, 10:23 PM

Ok, I've heard about this Seti@home stuff long enough. I'm curious now. Exactly what is it and what do you do? How does it work etc...

Mudshark · #2 November 11th, 2002, 10:31 PM

Ragnarok,

From the seti web site;
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

Suicide Junkie · #3 November 11th, 2002, 11:28 PM

What happens is that you download a small program, and it will run in the background while your computer is on.
It does a pretty good job of only using your idle processor time, so it will slow down or stop its work while you run some other application.

It will first download a chunk of raw data, and then grind away looking for patterns.
After roughly 10,000 Mhz-hours, it will finish, send the results back, and get another unit to work on.

If you're on a high-speed connection, you can set it to autmatically connect. If you're on dialup, it is probably best to have it wait. In that case, you will see the icon blink, and when you're connected, you can click it and press "connect now..." to send the results.

The total work done is tracked by email address, so if you have multiple machines, you can enter the smae address into the settings, and they will all count towards your ranking.

Ragnarok · #4 November 12th, 2002, 12:09 AM

Oh, ok, thanks for the answers. Sounds interesting.

Kamog · #5 November 13th, 2002, 08:04 AM

Has anybody found any interesting patterns in the data yet? If you're the one who processed the data that contains an alien message, will you become rich and famous?

How do they stop people from tampering with the data, adding fake Messages into the data etc?

Thermodyne · #6 November 13th, 2002, 10:06 AM

I don't think so, but you might get to go on Jay Leno's show

Baron Munchausen · #7 November 13th, 2002, 10:28 PM

Note: The original SETI@HOME projct will be ending next April (dunno exact date) after being extended several times. If you get started now you probably won't get many units done before then, and they've been having some problems anyway. But there will be new projects later in 2003, such as SETI II for the southern sky, and even some non-astronomical projects framed in the new 'generic distributed computing system' called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).