Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

SETI@Home to Crunch More Data 165

Posted by michael from the little-furry-animals-with-big-sharp-teeth dept.
BigDave writes: "In this article on Wired, it describes how SETI is gradually running out of data, as the current data acquisition system cannot keep up with the rate of processing (since they now have 3 million users processing data). They have acquired a new high-speed digital data recorder which is Linux-powered, and was donated by Hewlett-Packard."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

SETI@Home to Crunch More Data More

SETI@Home to Crunch More Data

Comments Filter:

  • Spare processing power? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yarn ( 75 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:13AM (#2397425) Homepage
    Maybe they could help out the STI Project [totl.net]

  • Is it not a waste? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kingpin ( 40003 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:17AM (#2397426) Homepage
    Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances of life out there - what else is new?

    Why not spending that processing time on some relevant projects where you can help make a differences? Like http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/. Or similar projects for scanning for asteroids or anything else that just has a plausible purpose.

    • but at least we wood no!

    • Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by xmath ( 90486 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:42AM (#2397451)
      Yea, but the idea of searching for ET is more appealing to people than cracking RC5 keys of solving the protein folding problem.

      It's just the idea that matter, searching for little green men is something people can imagine, while cryptographic keys or proteins is not "close" enough to the people, if you know what I mean..

      - xmath
      • Curing cancer would be "close" enough I guess... MUCH closer than little green men, at any rate.

        I think it's just that SETI@home came first and managed to become the most famous distributed project. And yes, it's much cooler than cracking a stupid encryption challenge -- you already know beforehand that it CAN be cracked, whereas at SETI there's something to be researched and the result is unknown.

        However, if they really have too much processing power and not enough data, SETI should probably tell their users to help a different project and come back later.
        • In a way they have:

          http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd =team_lookup&name=de.soc.mac

        • Curing cancer would be "close" enough I guess... MUCH closer than little green men, at any rate.

          Maybe some of us aren't prepared to contribute to work that is essentially just prescreening drug candidates that will then be used in animal experimentation.

          Perhaps the screensaver should give an estimate of the number of animals you have killed so far -- they must have an idea of the rate at which they expect to find suitable candidates, and the number of animals that will die in the initial investigation of a typical candidate drug (99% of which will turn out to be useless) is known, so this would be easy to calculate.

          Perhaps the screensaver should feature a special animation every time you've killed a whole animal... :-/

          Disclaimer: This is my own opinion based on my limited knowledge of the Intel/Oxford Cancer-Busting Project. It is based partly on assumption based on the contents of the website (which makes no mention of the research being non-vivisectional) but mainly on a question and answer that appeared in the website's user forum, in which a member of the Oxford team, responded to the concerns of one potential user by stating (to the best of my recollection) that any technique that allows drug candidates to be prescreened by computer will reduce the level of animal experimentation. I take this as fairly convincing evidence that the project is expected to include a vivisectional phase once suitable candidate drugs have been selected.

          If someone from the project wishes to correct me, I would be only too willing to retract the above remarks (in part or in whole, as appropriate) as well as to support the project by running the screensaver if the research project is completely non-vivisectional.

          • I hope someone can correct me, but for the forseable future, any new drug will involve a stage that animals are subject to experimenting with. As the researcher pointed out such use of computer modelling will reduce this number via modeling the potential predicted biochemical activity, thus those which do not show promise can be discard, reducing the numbers of animals that have to be used at this stage. However this still wont effect the stage where drugs have to be tested on animals for any toxicity.

            Unless we as a society are willing to accept the risks ourselves, to acknowledge that the notion of a doctor as a miracle work )whom with one wave of thier stethoscope can heal with out risk), to throw out the scapegoating of medical practitioners when errors occur (taking a more systems approach) and generally get a lot less legal suit slap happy and its a price, a sin if you wish, that has to be bourn. Thanks to such we have the LD50s of distilled water and paper, such more a ridiculous worthless value I can not fathom, being closer to the maximal volume of the rats stomach than any significant value.

            Consider it in this perspextive, by chosing to contribute to are making the best of a bad situation, animals are going to be used whatever, you can just help minimise the number.

            • This is a difficult area, and I didn't want to get into this much detail, since it's somewhat off-topic -- though the Cancer Buster screensaver seems to be one of the most popular distibuter computing projects after SETI, so it does have some relevence to the discussion.

              It's not at all clear to me that this project will reduce animal experimentation.

              Most of the compounds tried by the screensaver would never have been tested on animals, perhaps because they didn't seem plausible enough candidates, or simply due to lack of resources.

              In any case, it's a personal decision. I generally choose not to contribute to vivisectional research, and that decision hopefully reduces animal experimentation to some small extent. Others can choose to do otherwise (within the extent of the law, current and future).

              In terms of toxicity tests, there is actually very little evidence for a good correlation between mouse/rat and human drug toxicity. There are many drugs that were non-toxic in rats and/or mice, but proved toxic in humans -- so who knows how any valuable drugs that were non-toxic to humans were rejected because of their rodent toxicity?

              Far too little effort (and funding) goes to research into reducing and/or eliminating the need for vivisectional experimentation. Techniques using human tissue cultures very probably have the potential to replace a significant proportion of animal experiments and to give more accurate results as well.

              I'd suggest that those in the UK interested in this area look at two charities that fund research that aims to ultimately replace vivisection.

              • Dr Hadwen Trust [drhadwentrust.org.uk] -- They are the dark green end, and all their research is strictly non-vivisectional
              • FRAME [frame.org.uk] -- A somewhat lighter green organization that shares the same ultimate goal of the elimination of animal experimentaton, but sees the short to medium term means to that end as improving the animal techniques to reduce the number of animals that are harmed unnecessarily.

              I believe that both approaches complement each other.

              There are probably similar organizations in the US and elsewhere, but I have no references. (Both the above organizations have a links section on their website. FRAME's links page [frame.org.uk] is particularly unusual in that it lists links both pro and contra vivisection, and lets the reader decide. The Dr Hadwen Trust also has a links page here [drhadwentrust.org.uk]) -roy

          • I've had many loved ones die of cancer, as I'm sure many others have as well, This amy sound cold hearted but if they got to kill animals to cure cancer so be it. I think it's worth it. I'm going to go eat a steak now...........

        • Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Curing cancer would be "close" enough I guess... MUCH closer than little green men, at any rate.

          Can anybody explain to me why OGR is beneficial?

      • until we find them, they come for a god damn visit, and they take us over.

        I mean the "aliens" could be weak, but what if they aren't? What if they need exactly what we have and they are willing to do anything to take it.

        I would much rather waste my CPU time than max it out looking for annihilation.

        Just my worthless .02

        • Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by kzanol ( 23904 )
          until we find them, they come for a god damn visit, and they take us over.
          I would much rather waste my CPU time than max it out looking for annihilation.

          Careful there: First, seti is a PASSIVE search for ETs - we're not trying to send anything, we're just listening. Even if any anliens we happen to find should turn out to be nasty, I'd much rather have good inteligence on them than sitting on my dumb ass and get a nasty surprise one day.
          Also: "visiting to take take over" would be pretty low on my scale of possible threats: lightspeed barrier and travel time should make any personal contact pretty much improbable.

          If I'm going to worry, I'd be more along these lines:

          Alien paranoid race: they've got their own version of seti, they wait till the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation produced by an emerging civilisation (i.e by us) reaches them. Next they take steps to prevent us ever becoming a problem for them: just set some nice massiive missile in motion, accelerate to relativistic speed and have it home in on the radio signals.

          Raw materials: Once you've got an interstellar civilisation going, you might need raw materials, and lots of them. So, scan star systems for planetary systems with jupiter class planets. (they sould be able to find these easily - even we've managed to do as much). Send a bunch of unmanned probes over to replicate using resources found at the target and return processed raw materials. Takes a long time but then, you'd have to think in fairly long spans anyway as soon as you're considering more than one solar system. If one such mining/gathering probe happens on our system - tough luck; they'd probably not even notice we're here (or they just don't care).

      • Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2, Informative)

        by mr3038 ( 121693 )
        ...is more appealing to people than cracking RC5 keys...

        Of course it's. I think many will disagree but there's no point breaking RC5 or any other cryptographic key. We already know that it's possible. It's like breaking a glass. The only question is if it will break with the first hit... or how long it will take to break the key - we already know it'll happen sooner or later anyway. If we weren't breaking the key with brute force it could be more interesting...

        Searching for ET is more interesting because we don't know the answer for sure. Probably we won't find anything. OTOH, why miss the change to be the discover if we do?

        In the end, helping with folding problem [stanford.edu] would probably be the sane thing for a geek because there's a nice probability that we get something usefull out of used CPU time.

    • Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances of life out there - what else is new?

      What kind of data would be received? If it's something like Radio and TV, then we might get scientific broadcastings, so we could learn from them even if they are extinct.

      Of course, it's probably very hard to decode those signals.

    • Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pointwood ( 14018 ) <jramskov@ g m a i l . com> on Sunday October 07, 2001 @10:03AM (#2397524) Homepage

      What if we found ET? - that would be the biggest discovery imho. Besides that, I think it's "stupid" to discuss what project is better - the result is way to often a flamefest :(

      I run Folding@Home myself for Arstechnica (the #1 Seti and Genome team!) though, but that is a matter of personal preference.

      We have a nice page with introductions to the different Distributed computing (DC) projects we are involved in right here [arstechnica.com]. We "hand out" that page to new members of our "DC family". Then they can choose themselves what project they would like to support.

    • "Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that
      the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances
      of life out there - what else is new?"

      Maybe we should set our priorities straight. First let's use that network
      to figure out how to get to a distant S.O.S. while there is still hope,
      should we find one. Then let's use that network to create the Robot and AI
      (because it's to damn cold up there for anyone in their right mind to want
      to go to what we might think is an S.O.S. - not to mentioned being
      preparied to help...)

      Oh wait, there would be Intellectual Property battles in all of that, we'd
      never get off the ground. Hmmm, guess that just leaves Imaginary
      Vouyerism of extinct intelligent races. Hmmm, wonder if I can file a
      patent on that and royality tax the hell out of SETI@HOME... Least we now
      understand the @home part in a new vouyerism light...

      And with all these people who claim to have seen UFO's and had encounters,
      you'd think if SETI@HOME can't detect Alien life in our own back yard,
      what makes'em think they can find it in someones elses back yerd?

      Damn them Aliens are really good at playing hide and seek.

      • And with all these people who claim to have seen UFO's and had encounters, you'd think if SETI@HOME can't detect Alien life in our own back yard, what makes'em think they can find it in someones elses back yerd?

        Seti@Home may be the largest scale search for extra-teristrial inteligence currently in progress, but it's still prety limited.

        The NASA SETI project would have been the first (and only) really serious attempt to see if there is any evidence of someone out there, but NASA's funding for the project was axed shortly after it started.

        The fact that we've never found anything out there proves nothing. We've never seriously looked.

    • I've never understood why you would want to bother with this. there are so many factors pointing to why it i s awaste that I'm confused as to why people that I consider smart still waste their time with it.

      do I think there is other life out there? or course, it is possible, there is just so *much* out there that the chances seem decent.

      do I think it will be intelligent? well, that depends on how you define intelligence. even on our own planet there is much disagreement as to what defines intelligence just within humans (Howard Gardner at Harvard for instance could elaborate on this). or if you want to take a page out of The Collapse of Chaos (I think that is Ian Stewart), depending on the criteria, humans might not even be considered to have any intelligence - we are just biased towards out way of thinking.

      it seems like there is a pretty good chance of life out there, but that good chance is more towards mold, fungus, spores, bacteria, virus, etc - not complex creatures as ourselves.

      then you don't know if they can even comminucate to each other, let alone broadcast a signal out. and if they could, is it something we could detect? and then if that were the case, would we even know if we did get it, and could we understand it?

      it goes back to the same base human nature things you learn in a psych 101 class or poli sci - people are weak by nature, they feel vulnurable in a world they can't control - therefore they need to be controlled, they need to feel they have a purpose, and they need to feel like they aren't alone.
      this applys from everything to the rash of movies coming out that show men spending their lives looking for a woman they just happened to see - if gives women that feel lonely hope that there is someone out there looking for them, making them feel special.
      this is also much like religion in my mind - an opiate to calm that feeling that maybe you are worthless, maybe you have to purpose here, and maybe you aren't special, and maybe, there really is nothing after this.
      instead of blowing this life, do something good with it - or find religion and look to the stars.
      • that said, I use all of my extra processor time on distributed.net, the RC5 section (the other stuff I turn off).
        I think protein folding efforts are also worthwhile, and I think there is also use in the g.rulers.
        they have real hard concrete evidence of what their goal is and they will know when they've found it - otherwise, the rest are just good projects to bring people together, and maybe you get a screensaver out of it.

      • Maybe because it's fun?
        • hee hee - good point.
          everyone has a different sense of fun I suppose. personally, I see it on the same level of "fun" as if someone said "here is this math problem I want you to solve" (and I love math/logic problems) and it turns out it is impossible to solve (find what pi to the last digit is, and then divide by two)... that then falls, IMO, away from "fun" and into "waste of my time"
    • Its a matter of scale. Authors have made much of the impact that learning that there is (well has? by the time a signal would reach us) another civilisation out there. However in the shorter timeframe there are perhaps more pressing and worthwhile projects, be it looking at protein self assembly and nanotechnology [stanford.edu], modelling global warming [climateprediction.com] and so forth. Anyway, its your computer to use as you see fit and its up to various projects to press thier case for you idle time.
    • Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct.

      A scientist assumes nothing. That's how we've gotten this far.

      Why not spending that processing time on some relevant projects where you can help make a differences?

      Perhaps because I feel the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is incredibly "relevant"?

      Discovering life elsewhere would be the most important discovery I can possibly imagine. Your problem is your viewpoint is too small, too Earth-centric.
    • Want a good distributed project that could have some near future results. United Devices ( http://members.ud.com/vypc/cancer/about.htm )has a Cancer Research project running. Here is their Description.

      "Participants in the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project are sent a unit of molecules over the Internet. Their PC will analyze the molecules using drug-design software called THINK. The THINK software analyzes the molecular data by creating a three-dimensional model and changing its shape (or conformation) to attempt to dock it into a protein site. When a conformation docks successfully and triggers an interaction with the protein, it registers as a "hit". These hits are what this research hinges on. Any one hit may be the one that will ultimately lead to a cure. All hits are recorded, ranked as to strength, and filed for the next stage of the project."

      Yes United Devices themselves are for profit, but at least the project could do some good. Not saying others like foldingathome can't. But Remember that cancer is the #2 killer in the US after heart disease.
    • By finding conclusive proof that We Are Not Alone (tm), it profoundly changes the philosophic base of society as a whole.

      The specific scientific gains from any "information" received could be great, but more likely it will be meaningless or trivial.

      We, as a society, will have to come to terms with the fact that Humankind is not the sole divine purpose for the universe to exist. Similar to Galileo's findings hundreds of years ago, once again we'll have proof that We Are Not The Center Of The Universe (tm).

      For those of us that already believe that there is life elsewhere, this will be an amazing turning point. For those who are bound in religious beliefs that don't include any room for such possibilities, there will be great unrest and conflict. However, hopefully, as in the past, religion will slowly incorporate this new evidence into their rote, and move forward.

      I, for one, hope that it would be the one single scientific fact that could help unite the world. We're not alone. It's now "humankind versus the Universe", not U.S. versus Afganistan. We've a lot more in common with each other than we do with "them", and it may make our petty differences seem insignificant.

      Is that not a worthwhile goal?

      MadCow.
      • It's now "humankind versus the Universe"

        Right. Let's find life Out There so.. we can go kill it.

        Seriously,

        We've a lot more in common with each other than we do with "them", and it may make our petty differences seem insignificant.

        People just have to fight. If it's over who gets to be the head of your local P.T.A. (parent-teachers' association for non-USians) you're just lucky. If our aliens actually turn out to be "friendly" we will continue to fight amongst ourselves since we can't find conflict elsewhere. As long as we're mentioning afghans, I'll make an example of them. Once they had expelled the russians they decided to plunge themselves into civil war. Great.

    • Imagine we did read some meaningful data. I guess we can assume that the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances of life out there - what else is new?

      How many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed, as far as we know now? Zero.
      If SETI finds a signal, how many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed? At least one.

      I dunno about you, but I'd reckon such a discovery would be regarded as pretty damned significant by anybody who bothered to think about the issue for more than a millisecond.

  • ...reprocess the older data under different criteria? i would hate to think we missed something as importaint is stellar eavesdropping. but maybe not, what to i know?
    • I guess that's a decision that only they can take.

      Is it more likely that we missed something due to not doing enough analysis on the data, or due to not processing the right frequencies.

      They have already increased the amount of data processing done on the raw data at least once with the introduction of the triplet analysis

      To turn it around, I'd hate to think we missed something by wasting resources on ever more complex processing of a limited frequency band, when there was a very obvious signal out there but we just didn't bother to listen on the right frequency.

      • Is it more likely that we missed something due to not doing enough analysis on the data, or due to not processing the right frequencies.

        Nonsense. SETI performs a Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) on the raw data, which separates out the frequencies into pure sine waves. Fourier's theorem is that any and all waveforms can be represented as a sum of sine waves. We don't need to do "process the right frequencies" - FFT processes all the frequencies.

  • Please note (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spootnik ( 518145 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:38AM (#2397446)
    Some quantum physics theories suggest that when the user is not directly observing SETI@Home software, it may cease to exist or will exist only in a vague and undetermined state.

  • Distributed Cracking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flonker ( 526111 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:40AM (#2397449)

    I've been thinking about the whole distributed computing issue recently. SETI@Home and Distributed.net have proven how effective large scale parallel processing is. OTOH, Nimda has proven how effective a very simple worm can be.

    Joe Cracker just managed to get ahold of a password file from his favourite .mil site. But now he's stumped. He tried his regular password cracking programs, to no avail. He decides to code up a quick worm in Visual Basic, and in several hours he has thousands of computers working at his task.

    • Why can't somone just write a Microsoft Virus that downloads a Seti/RC5/Protein Folding client and uses the CPU cycles for that purpose? Okay, so it wouldn't be ethical, but it sure would be amusing.
    • It's been done, and distributed.net always disables the account and removes any blocks processed by that user.
      • I think it's a bit silly to remove the blocks, even from d.net (just give the money to charity if a key is turned up), but especially for the other projects. Zeroing the stats is a good idea but there's no point in dropping valid data.
  • They've cracked the DES-I, DES-III, RC5-56, and CSC encyption contests, and now they're alternating between cracking RC5-64 and finding optimal golomb rulers.

    http://www.distributed.net [distributed.net]

    • Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:5, Funny)

      by isorox ( 205688 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @09:21AM (#2397483) Homepage Journal
      They've cracked the DES-I, DES-III, RC5-56, and CSC encyption contests, and now they're alternating between cracking RC5-64 and finding optimal golomb rulers.

      When will they start on rot13?
      • The scene:

        A bunker deep beneath an unnamed mountain somewhere in the western US.

        Sir, we've had all of our top computers working on this message for months, and we can't crack it. Seven of our top cryptanalysts have starved to death while trying to decipher the thing. General, sir, we're losing this battle.

        The general pauses to think for a moment. Then he speaks.

        Colonel, do we still have that agent on the Captain Crunch marketing board? Good. Have him slip these Captain Crunch Secret Decoder rings into the marketing plan.

        A short phone call later, and twenty thousand little kids were working on the uncrackable ROT13 cipher.

    • Hmm. Let us see if we can brute force encryption by trying every possible key in the keyspace.

      RC5 isn't that impressive from a technological standpoint. The time it'd take can be estimated on paper, with maximum and minimum times. Heck, the key could of been found during the first 3 minutes of the contest.
    • Actually DES is sort of weak by todays standards. I once read somewhere that it's speculated that the U.S. goverment has a dedicated piece of hardware for cracking DES encryption, and can probably do it in about 15 minutes.

  • Other data (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xetrov ( 267777 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @08:47AM (#2397460)
    Why not do something similar trying to find a cure for cancer, or mapping genomes, or number crunching for physics simulations or something?

    Dont get me wrong, i like SETI
    but SETI@HOME is silly i think, when there are more important things to do. How about we apply some global computing power to getting INTO space, rather than wasting it listening to millions(?) of stars?
    • there is one (which I am part of) which is trying to find a cure for cancer. See http://members.ud.com/vypc/ for more details. It also gives a cool picture of what it is working on if you want that sort of thing. Bad side is it only runs on windows (so my firewall can't help out the fight).
    • Juno, a free/fee-for-service dial-up provider is or at least was planning to install software to process pharmacutical data to subsitises their free service. their was even talk of prohibiting free users from shutting down their 'puters in the future. It's politicaly sensitive because it's a commercial for profit project which i'm not following so it might have collapsed.
      I agree that SETI@home has a low cost/benefit ratio, that's why I'd rather crunch the data rather than have tax dollars pay some more for less. My 'puter has found lots of interesting signals, maybe one of them is a key to an important non-Seti phenomina.

      The technology is pretty well proven wth SETIatHome so I'm sure that other more mundane uses for it will be instituted. And actualy my last up-grade was driven by the desire to crunch data a bit faster so it easy for me to see SETIatHome aiding the tech secter.

    • If you like to do something different, you can find a nice overview of a few different projects here [arstechnica.com].

      Further questions can be asked in our forum.

      • Re:Other Projects (Score:2, Informative)

        by csmiller ( 315238 )
        For a fairly comprehensive list, check this out http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proje cts.html [aspenleaf.com]

        BTW S@H have admited for a long time that they send out each unit 3 or 4 times, for double-checking, and because they aren't splitting/recieving the units from Arecibo fast enought. However they only use a small band of Arecibo's datastream, centered on the H-OH 'waterhole' (1420MHz +/- 1.25 MHz); this should improve the rang of frequencies covered.
        There is talk of using southern SERENDIP [uws.edu.au] as a second antenna to get better sky coverage. They have another problem; S@H accounts for about 30% of Berkeley Uni's total out going bandwith, outside the Space Science Lab, the net admins aren't that happy about this. Unless they can get other SpaceScience Universities to share the load, they can't increase their userbase much more.

    • Re:Other data (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by rde ( 17364 )
      SETI@HOME is silly i think, when there are more important things to do
      Fucksake...
      Take any (any) endeavour, and you can come up with something more important if you put your mind to it. Protein folding? Why waste your time on such a trivial task when you can sell your computer and donate the money to helping children?

      Inoculating third world children? What a fucking waste of time. Most of them won't accomplish anything. You're better off donating money to schools for gifted children.

      Schools for gifted children? If they're that smart, they don't need help.

      The reason humanity is as wide, diverse and advanced as it is is that every one of us, in more ways than we can count, is standing on the shoulders of not just giants, but minnows (if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor). For every Newton, there are thousands of people whose names aren't recorded, but whose work has been passed down orally for generations, and is now taken as part of common sense instead of ground-breaking research.

      Who gives a shit about how dinosaurs walked? Who cares about whether phlogiston is fixed air or carbon dioxide? Throughout history, people have spent time, money and effort on what those around them considered to be a criminal waste of talent. If they hadn't, we'd still be in the dark ages.

      Will seti@home find anything? Maybe. Is my contribution likely to further mankind? Probably not. Is it more important than folding proteins? Depends on whether we find aliens or a cure for pancreatic cancer.

      Remember: there are no stupid questions. And 'does the noise from Epislon Eridani contain an artifical signal' is as valid a question as any you can think of.

  • SETI@Home meet AI@Home (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mentifex ( 187202 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @09:01AM (#2397469) Homepage Journal

    If there are not enough celestial data for the SETI@Home project, then let's turn some of that enormous Beowolfian processing power over to a categorically related AI@Home sub-project in the form of the First AI at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind [sourceforge.net] -- whjere we are creating the artificial intelligence that we may need (or may encounter) in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

    Just as the otherwise idle computers crunch data in the search for ET intelligence, the AI@Home project may become a contest to see whose computer will have the longest-running, gradually most ancient AI running as an uninterrupted artificial life (alife) form since Star-Date 200X.

    A few hard-core AI@Homers may provide the algorithmic advances while the masses of participating SETI+AI enthusiasts provide the PC's, workstations and supercomputers.

    When the AI@Home technology is sufficiently mature, then we turn the AI entities loose on the quest for their starborne brethren and sistren.

    Logic dictates: lim --> *** (The stars are the limit.)

    • You make me think that we ourselves are such creations, since we are doing what the things you're crreating are doing. Doesn't quite answer where we came from, but it affirms where we're going.

  • great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We have made very little effort to send out signals of our own, other than disparate radio signals emitted from around the globe (local). If a civilization is to be found via SETI, shouldn't we organize a program that emits signals to targetted stars systems that have planets in a temperate climate that can harbor life?? so that in turn they can send data to us.

    Does anyone know of technology that could do this?
    I have heard of the possility of using lasers to refine the broadcast of messages to other solar systems. I would be very intrigued to see if a community of global researchers uniting to provide strong signals outbound. Seti users have already displayed the commitment to listening, i am sure i am not the only one out there who would actively participate in this endeavour.

    Next stop radio shack!
    • We have had the ability to communicate with ET for arround 100 years. In terms of galatic history this is nothing.

      Also do we necersarily want to deliberatly give away our position? OK, voyager and pioneer had a "map" to get to us, but any civilisation discovering them before we become extinct will be within a few light years of us anyway - how long will it take the fastest one of them to get far enough away to have an ambiguous starting point?

    • we've done something like that already. we sent out something akin to an image showing that we have 9 planets and a star and several other items. I think it was sent in the 60s or maybe 70s. The image was very block-like similar to early video games. To my knowledge, we have not heard a reply.

      Does anyone know where a picture of this message is?
      • Here [seti-inst.edu].

        "The Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake (who was then Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and is now Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute) together with his Observatory staff, was a simple graphic consisting of 73 rows of 23 "bits" per row. This number of rows and columns was chosen because each is a prime number. Prime numbers could be easily guessed by any recipients, and that would help them to decode the graphic. The message was sent by simple shifting of the signal between two frequencies in the 2,380 MHz band. It took three minutes to send the message.

        The message itself gives the kind of information that any culture would want to learn about us: where we are located (at least within our solar system), what we look like (a crude stick figure), a simple drawing of the telescope used to send the message, and something about our biological construction (DNA and some of the building blocks of our biochemistry.) This message was sent as a "demonstration" to commemorate the upgrading of the 1,000 foot diameter Arecibo telescope with a new, more accurate reflector surface.        "

        (http://www.seti-inst.edu/general/ao_message_cro p. html)

        Yan

    • We already broadcast (Score:2, Informative)

      by GenetixSW ( 35311 )

      And it many ways, at that.

      Consider the fact that we've had radios for a hundred years now, and TVs for quite a while now. Add to that cell phones and satellite communications, and you've got a nice big EM bubble around Earth, of radius 100 light-years (since EM travels at light speed, and we've been sending them out for a century).

      Granted, a hundred light-years isn't much, but if aliens within that distance are looking out for signals in the same way that we are, they've got quite a large source of incoming info.

      But there's more! On March 15, 1999, a 400 000 bit-long transmission was sent out to four "local" star systems suspected of harbouring life. Take a look at the fascinating Encounter 2001 transmission [matessa.org]. It's absolutely worth a look. Try to figure some of it out too, just for fun =) IMO, it's brilliant.

      So we are, after all, broadcasting quite a lot, whether it be specific targetting or general.

      Cheers.

      • Hey! Thanks for that, it was pretty cool.

        I definately see some recognizable stuff there. Hydrogen molecule, of course, coordinates in realation to the galaxy, etc. Pretty smart stuff.

        How does that compare to what was sent out on the laserdisc on Voyager?

    • Some problems that occur to me with trying to broadcast messages. The number one problem of course is that all of our broadcasts (and the signals we are trying to receive with SETI) are travelling at the speed of light. That means that for all but nearby star systems, the messages will not arrive until the senders are long dead. For even the very closest couple of star systems, we are talking 5 or 6 years to receive a response to a message we send. And while it is not certain, there is a reasonably good chance that if any "civilization" existed on a nearby star system, we would have detected them by now.

      The problem with targetting star systems is figuring out which ones to target. So far we have not found one single system outside our own with "planets in a temperate climate that can harbor life", simply because we do not yet have the technology capable of finding such a thing. The best we can do currently is select systems with a single sun like star, but that number is probably still in the billions in our galaxy.

      And finally, there is the problem of the alien civilization detecting our signals. Unless our laser is putting out a beam that will exceed the brightness of the sun, the other system will have to have an ongoing program to search for lasers, that has continued uninterrupted for millions of years (since it is unlikely they will be at the same stage of evolution as us). That system would have to be comprehensive, scanning the entire sky, if they don't already know where we are. And if they do already know where we are, then it is pretty clear they do not want to talk to us yet.

  • Make a difference (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Throstur ( 300329 )
    Why not use your spare processing power for something that actually *matters* like cure for cancer? IMHO that's much more important than whether we are alone in the universe or not or if we can crack some encryption codes.

    You can download the (Windows only, sigh) clients from http://members.ud.com/vypc/ [ud.com].

  • Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apparently they usualy have around 15 transfers a second from the SETI dataservers - sure Slashdot ger ~25 hits a second, but 15 300K downloads a second = a hulleva lot of data.

    I'm amazed that they have even been able to do that! That's a lot of bandwidth.

    If only the southern hemisphere (say down in Australia) could be in the equation, and the SETI data team get more than 'part time' priority when it comes to collecting data from the dish.

    • Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SETI@home collects its data from the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We've been recording data at the Arecibo telescope since December 1998, and analysing that data since May 1999.

      SETI@home is a very fortunate science program. It utilizes 70% of the Arecibo telescope time. The other 30% is time used for repair, maintenance, or radar observations (Arecibo's powerful radar transmitters create too much interference for SETI@home's sensitive receiver).

      This is an extraordinary amount of telescope time! Most astronomers are lucky to get even a day a year on the telescope for their research. Since SETI@home doesn't need to point to any specific point in the sky, it just "goes along for the ride" while other astronomers use the giant antenna. If SETI@home could take data full time we would collect about 50 GB of data every day. It takes us about eight months to "cover" the Arecibo sky. This isn't 100% of the sky that is visible to the telescope since we don't control pointing, but it's close. SETi@Home's goal is to collect and analyze at least two years worth of data. This would allow us to cover the sky seen from Arecibo about three times.

  • The roots... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Aldreis ( 262637 ) <forums@NOsPaM.aldreis.com> on Sunday October 07, 2001 @09:26AM (#2397489) Homepage
    A lot of the early supporters of SETI@Home ( myself included ) joined it mostly as a political statement [setileague.org].

    "You are going to cut our funds?? Big deal. We'll find another way.
    Guess what? Now we have the biggest computer power in the world, all by volunteers!"

    It was one of the first glimpses of the Internet as a tool for "light civil disobedience", followed (?) by PGP, MP3, etc...

  • maybe they should also consider... (Score:5, Informative)

    by nilstar ( 412094 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @09:40AM (#2397505) Homepage
    Maybe the Seti@Home project should consider re-crunching old data. Versions 3+ perform a LOT more calculations than 2.x or 1.x versions of Seti@home. How about adding a new 3.x version, that will only calculate the uncalculated portion of old data in the existing system.
    • actually, that wont require new client software. they would want to setup the server to start sending out old raw data. Yes, some cycles will be wasted on redoing calculations already accomplished, but they have changed their algorithms to use faster math routines, so maybe this could simply verify the first result of a data unit and the overall integrity of the new algorithms.
    • They actually do recheck old data (even, before 3.x all data pieces where sent to at least 2 people) Quote from seti's website:
      SETI@home has enough volunteers such that we can process each piece of data more than once and compare the potential signals detected by different computers to one another.
      And: There are also many work units that were processed by more than one version of the SETI@home client.

      This picture shows what has been scanned, and how many times. [berkeley.edu]
    • Maybe the Seti@Home project should consider re-crunching old data

      The problem with this is that they would still eventually run out of data (at the current rate) because they would be just postponing the date until later. They need to collect the data faster or they will just run out in another year (or so).

  • Better than the lotto! (Score:3, Funny)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @09:47AM (#2397517) Homepage Journal
    Just think tho, if your computer is the one that finds the signal from ET, you not only get to be on every talk show (along with the SETI eggheads), but you will probably get your biography published, becoming an instant babe/stud magnet! Not to mention you will get an automatic entry to compete to see who gets to ride in the wormhole riding ball machine built from the plans that are undoubtedly being sent our way right now (not to mention patent rights to aforementioned machine). And all this for free FREE FREE (as long as you are running it on your office machine, since you don't pay for electricity there). And don't forget the screensaver (ohhhh, pretty blinking lights).

    __

    Don't sweat the petty stuff but do pet the sweaty stuff.
  • I've done the SETI thing and the Distributed.net thing and both, IMHO, were not very pragmatic. Other distributed projects exist, like Folding@Home [stanford.edu] and my favorite Genome@Home [stanford.edu]. They need more computing power, so please visit and try them. The even have Linux console versions for x86 machines.

  • How about a project which needs cycles? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Quite awhile ago I gave up on the SETI@Home project because I felt they were consuming cycles which they didn't really need. Instead, I've been contributing extra cycles to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search [mersenne.org] (GIMPS), which is looking for the next largest known prime.

    There's even a $100,000 prize for the first 10,000,000 digit prime number. I encourage others to consider this project -- RC5 is close to pointless now (RC5/56 proved limited encryption is of no value), and SETI@Home already have more cycles than they can use.

  • *Sigh* This won't help the stereotype that Linux is the choice of geeks and freaks.

    Maybe we should give up and make a The Next Generation distribution - "boldly going where no user has had to go since 1981".


    Just kidding

  • Wicked old atheists (Score:3, Informative)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @10:21AM (#2397546) Homepage Journal

    I seriously question the science of SETI@home. I left them after one of the first debacles where they kept sending out the same packet of data to most everyone.

    genome [standford.edu] and folding@home [stanford.edu] just seems so much more likely to be useful.

    If you're an atheist (or even if you aren't) you're welcome to join our genome@home team [stanford.edu], Wicked Old Atheists [localhostc...heistshtml]. We're currently placed #24 in the world.

    • I left them after one of the first debacles where they kept sending out the same packet of data to most everyone.

      If you abandon every free-thinking project the first time a bug is exposed, well, you're probably a very frustrated guy. Especially in the Open Source, Free Software, or Linux camps! Have some patience. (News flash: They fixed that bug you think of as a "debacle".)

  • Some additional information... (Score:3, Informative)

    by hhe_hee ( 470065 ) <prodigy@acHORSEc.umu.se minus herbivore> on Sunday October 07, 2001 @10:28AM (#2397551) Homepage
    For those who doesn't know it they (SETI@home [berkeley.edu]) recently reached the Zettaflop (10e+21 floating-point operations) mark which is a world record. The last 24 hours "they" (read the users) performed 6.104916e+18 flops which is about 70.66 Teraflops/sec. This can be compared to the Terascale Computing System [slashdot.org] that theoretically could reach a maximum of 6 teraflops per second *laugh*. SETI's total cpu-time lies around 750 000 years, _pretty cool_ eh?
  • Its really nothing compared to the S@H bandwidth cost alone for 3 million members.
  • that we haven't made contact yet. If we ever did connect with an Interstellar /., sure as shooting, somebody would post a goatsx message. And then we'd find out that they mod down with an Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator!

    After connecting to IntStelNet, please listen for a thousand years before posting...

  • For the socially retarded (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheMightyZog ( 228867 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @11:47AM (#2397654)
    How about taking some of this distributed computing power and use it to process the subtle signals given by women. Is she really interested, or is she just being nice? Now we geeks can find out!

  • I got a lot of fascination and fun out of SETI for a couple of years, and even burned my fingers a couple of times on the vent of my laptop (I swear you could fry eggs on that thing when it was looking for green men in SETI packets). There came a point, however, when it dawned that SETI had enough momentum to continue without me should I wish to look at other distributed processing projects.

    Then I came across the Olson laboratory's FightAIDS@home [fightaidsathome.org] project, and decided to take a look. And now I'm crunching HIV Research units, something which though arguably less spectacular/glamorous than looking for aliens, certainly deserves our more immediate (collective) attention.

    So if you're casting around for something worthy to occupy your idle CPU, or even if you're just curious, why not take a look [fightaidsathome.org]?

  • From the article, it's pretty obvious that the SETI project seems to have plenty of search power. I'm a bit disheartened that they still haven't found anything yet. I know it's a gigantic universe with an almost infinite amount of places to search, but not finding anything must say something about the scarcity of aliens/civilizations/radio/whatever. Or perhaps the aliens have simply switched to fiber...

  • SETI@Home is looking for obsolete radio signals. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @12:48PM (#2397755) Homepage
    The trouble with SETI@Home is that it's based on the assumption that somebody is sending a signal with a "carrier", a constant-frequency signal. The trouble with looking for carriers is that any sufficiently advanced transmission system looks like noise. (That's why modern modems sound like noise, not beeps.) Carriers are obsolete, because they waste energy and spectrum. For example, about 80% of a TV signal's energy is in the carrier, which carries no information.

    All newer transmissions systems, from SSB to spread-spectrum to GPS to HDTV, don't use carriers. The FCC wouldn't license a transmission system today that used a carrier. In time, all radio will be carrierless, to save spectrum space. That date is probably about 20 years away, after the transition to HDTV and digital audio broadcasting. So for less than a century will our civilization have broadcast carriers. That's a narrow window to hit when looing for another civilization.

    There's some redundancy in all carrierless systems, but it may be only a few percent, and it's hard to find if you don't know how to look for it. Typically, detecting a spread-spectrum signal involves trying to synchronize a psuedorandom number generator at the receiving end with the signal. This is hard when you have no idea what the psuedorandom number generator looks like. It's not impossible; it's a cryptographic problem. But it's hard to detect a signal so weak you can't read the bits.

    You can look for the presence of a carrier so weak that you can't detect the modulation, by averaging over many cycles. That's what SETI@Home actually does. So if there are carriers out there, SETI@Home should find them. But unless someone is deliberately beaming carriers at us, there's nothing to find.

    I've met some of the SETI@Home people, and they admit this problem. By now, if anybody in our stellar neighborhood was aiming high-power continuous carriers at us, we'd know it. But there could be signals encoded in more efficient ways and thus look like noise. SETI@Home will never find them.

    I think that the SETI@Home effort should be devoting more resources to finding non-carrier signals. Maybe long-period autocorrelation, looking for repeats of bit patterns, would be more appropriate than the present carrier search. Something that sounds like stellar hiss might turn out to have data in it.

    • You are right, Seti@home would not be able to detect any modern signal since they look like white noise unless you know what you are looking for.

      I think that the point, however, is that seti@home is looking for signals that extraterrestrials would send *in order to be found*, as earth itself did in the past. These signals are deliberately simple, just a sort of "hello, we are out there".

    • But there could be signals encoded in more efficient ways and thus look like noise. SETI@Home will never find them.

      So true. The signal could come in some other form than the "spikes, gaussians, or triplets" that SET@home searchs for. That is why I save all of my work_unit.sah files and analyze them manually with www.baudline.com [baudline.com]. (note: baudline only runs on x86 Linux)

      In the 1000+ WU's I've collected and analyzed I have found many interesting signals that didn't match the S@H "spike, gaussian, triplet" profile. Some had the drift rate of a non-terrestrial origin but they didn't match Arecibo's beam width. Were they SETI? Probably not. But hey, it is a lot of fun to keep searching.


      You can look for the presence of a carrier so weak that you can't detect the modulation, by averaging over many cycles. That's what SETI@Home actually does.

      Baudline can also do this type of averaging with it's drift integrator tool. Coupled with baudline's color aperture window I've found that the human eye is very sensitive at finding signals in noise. What would be really great is if the SETI@home project had a way for users to manually search for signals and send in feedback. Sigh, they probably would hate the flood of message they'd receive. Maybe I should start the SETI@home@baudline project?
  • There have been upgrades to SETI clients. I think that we were told that the last upgrade would run slower because it would do a lot more processing on every unit.
    Maybe they could do even more processing?

  • Calvin and Hobbes (Score:2, Informative)

    by akruppa ( 300316 )
    I second Calvin's (of Calvin and Hobbes) opinion, "the surest sign that there IS intelligent life out there is that they haven't tried to contact us."

    I prefer projects with a higher probability to make an actual differene to how people live, like the (already named) Folding@Home [stanford.edu], Genome@Home [stanford.edu], or FightAIDSatHome [fightaidsathome.org]. The last one may not appeal to many here as Entropia, the distributed computing network behind it, apparantly insists in throwing in some commercial work packets to the clients. Finding a cure for AIDS sounds like a splendid idea, otoh.
    My personal favorite is GIMPS [mersenne.org], the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, discoverers of the four largest explicitly known prime numbers. I like them because you actually have a chance to understand what the program is doing (if number theory is for you, that is). IMHO better than looking at some blinking lights of a screen saver that looks for ET.

    Alex

  • All about the screen saver (Score:3, Funny)

    by GrEp ( 89884 ) <crb002@gm a i l.com> on Sunday October 07, 2001 @03:13PM (#2398538) Homepage Journal
    SETI is all about the screen saver. Most people who use SETI do it because of the cool blocks of FFT that get assembeled before their eyes, not because they are going to find ET. Anyone know of some cross platform (OpenGL??) screen savers one could use as the front end for a distributed computing project? SETI has proved that marketing is way more important to content for desktop supercomputing.

    A cool screen saver and a spiffy website is all I need to get people to do my genetic programming runs for me. hehe...
  • Why oh why are they not *OPEN SOURCEING* these distributed projects?

    • Why oh why are they not *OPEN SOURCEING* these distributed projects?


      The Seti@home FAQ [berkeley.edu] says about this:

      "We decided not to make source code available for security reasons and for science reasons as well. We have to have everyone do the exact same analysis, or we can't have any control over our research and be confident in our results. We were also worried that there may be a few people that want to deliberately try to screw up our database and server."

  • dmca@home? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Sunday October 07, 2001 @03:51PM (#2398732)

    It's time to write a distributed program that will grok all legalese in the world, and use massive seti@home-style processing to figure out every possible way to repeal the DMCA and other defective copyright laws. The distributed program would itself be protected by the DMCA, and any attempts by the MPAA/RIAA to stop the processing would be "circumvention."

  • Why not just take new data from /dev/random? It's must have similar odds of finding life.

  • Truly a waste of time (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Im all for finding ET... But SETI and such attempts are a complete waste of time. Reasons?

    1) The odds of finding something based on our current methods are dismal at best.
    2) To date there has never been a single tangible form of evidence that this is even worthwhile.
    3) There is no use to receiving an alien signal as we will not be able to respond

    Now, you may all hear they have "little" funding... well Ill garantee you they have more funding than I make in a year! To me, thats too much, for some 6th grade science experiement.

    The folks that run SETI@Home have done nothing but give their PC something to chew on while doing nothing else. So what? Thats fine - couldnt care less if it were calculating PI to the gazillion'th place. But its still as much a waste of time, money, and power.
  • One of the reasons i choose s@A is because no commercial company is going to benefit from my processing (unless we are selling trips to meet he aliens) sure while searching for cancer,aids,cure to everything is very noble people seem to forget that these "cures" will be SOLD on the commercial capaltist market by [insert drug company name here] NOT for free
    how much will you pay not to get cancer or Aids ?. hmm lucrative business egh

    Allready we have had drug companies in the global courts over not allowing 3rd world poor companies (who we put in debt) who wanted to give these products to their people dying of aids and these wernt even cures !, just temp fixes, these drug companies didnt care wether 3rd world africa's people lived or died all they cared about was their profit margin

    if we have this much trouble with drug companies who dont have a cure, imagine how much trouble we will have when they find a cure and the ensuing patents,trademarks etc another case of "pay up or die" and "the rich live, the poor die" even if they got the answer to their problems for free by using YOUR computer!

    Something to think about while crunching data for that "cure to everything" for a major billion dollar drug company

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close