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.

FP

[Anonymous Coward]

First Pulsar

Oh wait, I'm blind

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Space

[Midnight's Shadow]

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.

Re:Folding@Home

[interkin3tic]

No idea how you combine those two into "The claim that this is the first discovery to be made through distributed computing".

Distributed summary writing, mostly.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

refuse pump

Tell me, do you feel somehow obliged to read stories from a "refuse pump"?

It's like the fat woman who complains how horrible the fried chicken tastes as she digs into the third bucket.

Re:Space

[PopeRatzo]

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.

I'm surprised so many people believe there is intelligent life in the Universe.

You certainly wouldn't find any in the broadcast frequencies emanating from Earth. And if there were aliens who somehow picked up the radio signals coming from Earth, they would think that the United States is a dystopian tyranny governed by the worst dictator since Pol Pot, who also happens to be an outrageous cartoon character, halfway between J.J. from Good Times and Thugalicious from Boondocks, mixed in with a ghetto version of Stalin. And they'd get that impression from just one 15 minute segment of Rush Limbaugh.

Re:Folding@Home

[Anonymous Coward]

And SETI@Home started in 1999, a year and a half before Folding@Home, so if SETI@Home wasn't successful at all after a year and a half, it's unlikely that Folding@Home would have even taken off!

Oh, wait a minute ...

Almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins

[noidentity]

From the article:

The program, which has been downloaded to 500,000 computers around the world over the past five years, almost literally turns volunteers into Einsteins at home.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.