SETI Institute Is Looking For a Few Good Algorithms 98
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.'"
If (signal eq '6EQUJ5') (Score:5, Funny)
print "WOW!"
I wonder if they survive... (Score:3, Funny)
I don't doubt that there is life elsewhere, there just has to be, right.
I also don't doubt that space travel is possible, though this may well be.
What I am beginning to doubt is if intelligent life really survives long enough. Seriously, the more intelligent we get, the more damage we do, and it seems that extinction is an inevitable consequence of any combination of freedom and destructive power, aka technology, over any long period of time.
One of these days someone will trip on a cord or spill their coffee, and we are all going to die!!!
How hard could it be... (Score:5, Funny)
alert("Found Alien!!! Prepare for destruction!!!)
end if
Re:How hard could it be... (Score:5, Funny)
>>> SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
See, it's much harder to implement than it looks.
Re:According to Claude Shannon... (Score:5, Funny)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise.
So those noise making things that we heard at the World Cup actually were a sign of intelligence?????
Re:Questions (Score:2, Funny)
Ok, I don't know anything about this stuff but basically SETI is a big radio telescope array right?
SETI [lmgtfy.com]
Re:If you thought the "Face on Mars" was fun (Score:3, Funny)
Are you kidding? Perfect prior art once and for all. "Your honor, we received the allegedly infringing work from a radio station broadcasting from 20,000 light years away which means it was produced and transmitted well over 19,900 years before it was copywritten on Earth. Based on current laws on Earth, that puts it firmly into the public domain by now, not withstanding any unknown copywrite laws in effect in this galaxy and/or cluster."
My head is hurting... (Score:3, Funny)
But only because you've blown my mind!
Re:How hard could it be... (Score:3, Funny)
if data contains alien_signal then alert("Found Alien!!! Prepare for destruction!!!) end if
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.