OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home

Suicide Junkie · #1 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 · #2 November 12th, 2002, 12:09 AM

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

Kamog · #3 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 · #4 November 13th, 2002, 10:06 AM

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

Baron Munchausen · #5 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).

Thermodyne · #6 November 14th, 2002, 08:34 AM

Hmm..April...

Should be able to hit 20K by then

Only 9799 to go

[ November 14, 2002, 06:35: Message edited by: Thermodyne ]

Suicide Junkie · #7 November 15th, 2002, 11:51 PM

This seti group needs to have the Webpage link updated!

Right now it ends up at a 404.
It should probably link back here to Shrapnel