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Science

SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result 312

Posted by timothy from the why-if-I-only-had-a-nickel-for-every dept.
Jonathan writes: "SETI@Home, the largest distributed computing project in the world, is on the verge of receiving its 500 millionth result. This is a major milestone for both the project and distributed computing as a whole. Oh, and if you still need some added incentive to get involved, there's a $500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result."
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SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result More

SETI@Home Close to Half-Billionth Result

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  • the original? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @07:43PM (#3426471) Journal
    Ok, now all you folks staring at the pretty screensaver really ought to be cracking keys for Distributed.net. [distributed.net]

    If everyone just jumped on RC5, we'd have the 128-bit key done by now, and ET would still be there waiting for us. If you're going to talk to aliens, shouldn't you at least let them know your computer can brute force a 128-bit encrypted RC5 key? If that doesn't impress them, nothing will. Once they see that, they'll probably show us the secrets of interstellar travel, and eternal life, things like that. But only if we crack keys first, so go download the Dnetc client and get cracking!

    • ..and dont forget to join slashdot team :)

      btw if you find key you will get 1000$

    • Re:the original? (Score:5, Funny)

      by sam_handelman ( 519767 ) <samuel DOT handelman AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday April 28, 2002 @08:19PM (#3426613) Journal
      ET: Greetings, hu-mans. We contact you to usher you into the great community of sentient species!
      Human: We have d3crypt3d ur private k3v/s! \|/3 wi11 h4xxor u!
      ET: Stop that. It's an insult to the dignity of all thinking beings.
      Human: 1 4m s0 3|_33T!
      ET: I didn't wait 10,000 years for my answer to cross the icy depths of space so I could read your sophmoric babblings.
      Human: 1 r0xx0rd u!
      ET: Your puny intellect is no match for our massive weapons!
      Human: Br1|\|g it on! U \|/1|_|_ f34r /|\3!

      Of course, I just assume that alien intelligence is like me. Maybe I'm just too closed-minded to envisage a form of consciousness that isn't driven into a homidical rage by leet-speak.

      Seriously, while there are a great many ways besides SETI you can meet people and waste processor cycles together (I know - keep analysing the ripples in the surface of loch ness until you find the "messages" pixies are sending us from another dimension!) my colleagues at Oxford [ox.ac.uk] have managed to come up with something genuinely useful to do with your spare processor cycles.

    • AFAIK that is not the first project - GIMPS [mersenne.org] (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) started before D.net.

      If you want to know more or have questions about GIMPS, I would highly recommend you to visit (and maybe even join) Ars Technica Team Prime Rib [teamprimerib.com], it's a very active team and they have great stats :)

  • $500 reward for the user who returns the milestone result.
    lol, I bet the winner is some guy who just signed up for the project the day before - the SETI@Home version of a Slashdot first post ;)

  • Is it worth it? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has SETI posted any *real* results yet, or is it just a waste of time and CPU cycles?

    • It *is* worth it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EReidJ ( 551124 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @07:53PM (#3426521) Homepage
      Worth it? Oh yes, most definitely.

      I consider SETI@Home to be one of the most inspirational projects ever attempted by our generation. Really, it's my equivalent of the moon shot (which happened two years before I was born).

      I don't get misty-eyed very easily, but when I think about the films of JFK's inspirational speech... well, I hope the Kleenex is handy.

      "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

      Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.

      God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.

  • Bankrupt? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i thought @Home was dead?

  • Perfect Timing.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mrdzone ( 562353 )
    Now that E.T. has returned to the theatres maybe seti will finally get some respect.

  • Better hurry... (Score:4, Informative)

    by tg_schlacht ( 570380 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @07:47PM (#3426494)
    By my calculations based on Seti's stats from the last 24 hours the 500 millionth result will be reached in 3.67 days.

  • Great program (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've always thought SETI was a great program, my firm provides a lot of data to the seti institute, when we aren't using the radio telescopes in our building (about once every few weeks).

    The real question is, what have they learned from their project, not only as far as life in outer space is concerned, but also in the terms of such a large distributed computing project? It seems like this would be a great thing for NPO's to get involved in, to solve other problems such as global warming, and the problem which I think we will all agree is the most important, how to pour hot grits down Natalie Portman's naked petrified pants?

  • if you want to learn more about distributed computing there is great article [extremetech.com] that describes various types of distributed computing and how distributed computing works.

  • Quite a bargain... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @07:52PM (#3426514) Homepage
    Not that I'm critical, but just because it's amusing: $500 is the prize for the half-billionth unit. That equates to 0.0001 cents per 17-hour CPU unit.

    Looked at another way, the total number of FP operations to reach the 0.5 gigaunit mark is 1.5319e21. The brand new NEC Earth Simulator [jamstec.go.jp] runs at 35,600 gigaflops. At that rate, the world's fastest supercomputer would take 43030061.73 seconds, or 498 days, to do the job.

    I wish I could lease the world's fastest computer for $1 a day...
    • You're missing a critical fact: there is more than one computer being used for SETI@Home!
  • Folding@home is actually trying to help cure diseases. Seti@home is chasing noises in space. I would much rather cure the diseases personally.
    • http://folding.stanford.edu
    • yeah but one way or the other SETI@home is better, if we find alliens they might show us not only how to cure diseas but also boost us by several 100 years worth of research in other fields like physics etc. and on the other hand if they're destructive and (well duh...) destroy us, then we don't have to worry about disease! didn't that make ur day?
      --tzan

    • Saying that somebody sucks because they prefer Seti instead of F@H is lame IMHO. Far from everyone can run the F@H client simply because of their configuration. The F@H client more or less needs an "always on" internet connection, you can run it on a modem connection, but I personally wouldn't. In that case I would be run a different project, maybe the G@H project (the sister project to F@H), more info can be found on the Team Primordial Soup website [teamsoup.org].

      It also depends on what kind of OS you are using. The F@H project has clients for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Yes, that is what most people uses, but it still leaves out a lot of people. Another project, similar to the F@H project is the Distributed Folding Project [distributedfolding.org]. It has clients for a lot of platforms and the science is good. You can find more info and a lot of links on the Ars Technica Team Stir Fry website [dbestern.net] which is the team I'm crunching for.

      I personally prefer projects like F@H and Distributed Folding because they potentially could lead to the discovery of new drugs for cancer and other terrible diseases which we currently have no cure for.

    • Folding@home is actually trying to help cure diseases. Seti@home is chasing noises in space. I would much rather cure the diseases personally.


      Do you suggest that you know somehow that seti@home may not produce in any case either directly or far more possibly indirectly information that can be useful and eventually applied to enchant the quality of our everyday lives? If so, I'd say that it's a quite bold claim. Yes, folding@home quite possibly provides results that can be applied in short term practically, but that does not make it automatically more worthwhile project.

  • is when someone intercepts the communication from beginning on, and fakes a client to the server and a server to the client, since the protocol, as described in the article, allows anyone that receives, or intercepts the messages from beginning on, to create a fake other side, and construct an impersonator for the server of the other side.

    This would be done simply by replying to the server with the fake clients guesses, and establish an authemticated connection with it. To the other client, at the same time, one would transmit a random sequence just as the server would, and reply , just as the server would. The sequence is not identical, it doesnt have to be: the client has no way of knowing.

    If this major flaw is not corrected (it might be already), the system has no possible way of creating a secure enviroment.

    --------------------
    I listen to dune, do you?

  • command line seti@home (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrscorpio ( 265337 ) <twoheadedboy.stonepool@com> on Sunday April 28, 2002 @08:00PM (#3426551)
    Everyone who wants to get packets done fast should run this version. I upgraded from a 400mhz PII/128MB RAM/Voodoo Banshee 16mb/Win 98 to Athlon XP 1700+/256MB RAM/Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB/Win 2k and saw no significant improvement. I tried the command line version and cut time per packet down by 83%.

    Maybe you won't see as much improvement as me, but you'll definitely see some, I guarantee.

    Chris
    • I should note that it is available on the downloads page at seti@home...

      http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ - seti@home homepage

      http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/unix.html - command line seti@home download page. The Windows version works with all versions 95 (95 with winsock 2 upgrade) and greater. And there are versions for just about every flavor of Unix under the Sun (haw haw, I made a funny!), along with Mac.

      Chris

    • I'm fairly sure some of these problems were fixed ages ago. Originally when the GUI client was minimised it still drew the graphics. IIRC that's no longer the case. So if you want it to work quicker, run it in the background and use the blank screen saver. Otherwise, of course drawing cute graphics takes time.
      • you've got that right... i crank out about 3 units a day with it minimized, with the screen saver running it takes my box about 30 hours for a single unit.

    • Yes, be sure to run the command line client - it is much faster. Other tips, stats and stuff can be found on the #1 Seti team: Team Ars Technica Lamp Chop [teamlambchop.com] (TLC).

      All you Americans should join TLC *now* [arstechnica.com] unless you want Seti Germany to overtake the top spot in Seti!

  • Since some guy on Regis and Kelly predicted that a major UFO sighting will happen sometime between May and June!
  • anal probe?

    Actually i am hoping for an all expense paid trip to an allien zoo, where i will have to live naked with a supermodel, and we will fuck for the education and entertainment of the aliens. (thanx for the fantasy kurt vonnegut, you are the best)

  • but my computer needs its time off when it isn't converting
    video files so I can burn them as VCDs.

    Also I think that I read in scientific american that the odds of
    them actually finding anything are VERY VERY small.

  • The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. A Mersenne Prime is of the form 2^x-1. Five have been found so far through GIMPS. [mersenne.org]

    If it's money you want, it's $100,000 to the GIMPS for the first person who can catch a ten million digit prime number [mersenne.org], and then split up according to the rules on this page.

    If it's nobility you want, the money is awarded by the EFF to spur on cooperative computing [eff.org].

    BTW, it was a Slashdot story that clued me in in the first place [slashdot.org].
    • ...$100,000 to the GIMPS for the first person who can catch a ten million digit prime number [mersenne.org], and then split up according to the rules on this page.

      After the split, what are you going to do with your 42 cents?

      • After the split, what are you going to do with your 42 cents?

        uh... read the page before you post, you know? kinda like thinking before talking? ;-P

        by my quick reading of the page, it looks like $35,000 if you get the 10 million digit prime, or $5,000 if you get any other kind of mersenne prime in the meantime.

        i think it's less than $35 grand, specifically, $25 grand, if someone claims the $10 grand for discovering a new search algorithm... no skill or spare cycles involved in winning that at all, but a lot of cranium capacity! ;-P

        and the odds are not bad, at least on the scale of the lotto... like something around 1 in 250,000... albeit, each chance is going to cost your average 1 GHz pentium around 6 months of steady work...

        i think i'm beginning to sound like a salesman for this search, so just so you know, i have no affiliation to the GIMPS site at all, i'm just an eager individual... in fact, it would behoove me not to plug it so there is more chances for those already involved! ...but that's not the point of these kind of projects ;-)

        download the app folks... it's a kewl deal, you might make mathematics history!
    • The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. A Mersenne Prime is of the form 2^x-1.

      Where's the fun in that? We already know those prime numbers exist!
      • Where's the fun in that? We already know those prime numbers exist!

        i think the point of the search is that some 2^x-1 are prime, and some are not... and because of the mathematics involved, it is relatively easily to factor them, and to also find some really huge primes in the process...

        the deeper question of why the heck we should look for them are more philosophical... some concrete reasons? there are cryptological applications, i think, and mathematical implications, most definitely... but mostly, it's just kewl, you know? why do anything in life? why go to the south pole? why go to mars? why get out of bed in the morning!

        here's a good list of detailed reasons: [utm.edu]
        Tradition!
        For the by-products of the quest
        People collect rare and beautiful items
        For the glory!
        To test the hardware
        To learn more about their distribution

    • If you want to do something really useful, how about Stanford's protein folding project [stanford.edu]? Sure, it would be neat to know that ETs are out there, but given lightspeed limitations, we probably won't establish meaningful communications with them in our lifetimes (plus, I saw a comment below claiming that they're already processing data faster than they can collect it). Prime numbers have virtually no practical applications whatsoever, except maybe for allowing us to send out longer messages of our own to ETs. But protein folding has the potential to allow a tremendous leap forward in medicine and biotech.

      Likewise, I first heard about it in a slashdot story. [slashdot.org]

    • Great stats can be found on the Ars Technica Team Prime Rib website [teamprimerib.com]!
      They have excellent stats and a lot of information about the project. It is managed by a very cool bunch of people.

  • All that work done, all to accomplish nothing at all. Other than flinging pseudoscientific displays on a lot of people's computer screens.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @08:25PM (#3426627)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That's a quote from Alexander Smith, by the way. I think it's true. People are likening the SETI@home project to a noble challenge that citizens should be rallying behind, as if it's the "race to the moon" of the present day. Well, I'll tell you... I'm 100% behind the concept and philosophy of SETI@home and I've dedicated many a CPU-year to it. But let's face it... we can't "lose" and nothing is really on the line here. Where's the glory in it if there's no guts risked?

    Well, unless you count burned fingers on the heatsink of an overclocked SETI@home machine. :-P
    • Actually I think there is quite a bit at risk. The discovery of intelligent life possibly more intelligent than us could cause some severe religious, social and governmental problems.

      For religious types it might mean they have to redefine and reinterpret their texts. It could even be worse for religions if the message we receive says something like "Nice to see you are coming along. We wondered how long it would take our genetic experiment to mature this far along."

      Socially it could easily become an "us vs. them" mentality where we stand more unified. This would be a good thing. Perhaps many disputes would resolve very quickly. Perhaps not.

      For governments it could be troubling because now we are faced with a potential new threat. Especially if they are far more technically advanced. Do we make contact? What if they want to colonize because their planet just got creamed by a supernova? More to the point, what if they check out our DNA and find us to be an alarming mixture of intelligence and animalism to the point of us being the killer bees of the galaxy? I know this isn't necessarily likely but imagine their disposition. Here is an intelligent species that uses technology at every turn as a weapon.

      Anyway, enough rambling. I hope my point is clear.
      • Your point is clear, yes. However, you're talking about the "risks" of winning. That's more along the lines of "be careful what you wish for", as opposed to taking on real risks to attain your goal. SETI@home doesn't really require anyone to take risks, make sacrifices, etc. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's all quite civilized and safe, really. That's great. My point was that this quest is in stark contrast to those which require true risk, like landing on the moon, circumnavigating the globe, summitting Everest, a manned mission to Mars, etc. It's all good though.

        The nerd who computes the alien-confirming SETI@home work unit won't go down like Neil Armstrong or Sir Edmund Hillary in my book.
    • Perhaps this is true with "real world" adventures -- climbing mountains, fighting battles, sailing across uncharted seas.

      However, it is totally evident that this comment is meaningless when it comes to accomplishments of the intellect. Einstein didn't risk his life (though perhaps he did stake his career) on the development of General Relativity, but does that remove one iota from the genuine beauty of his theory? The same holds true for accomplishment in all spheres of human intellectual achievement : the sciences, the arts and humanities, and so on. You may argue that it is the "revolutionaries" who inevitably make the greatest discoveries by risking careers and reputations, yet history demonstrates that at least as often, the revolutionaries are purely accidental (ie, Rutherford backscattering, the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, etc.) Yet the accidental nature of the discovery does not tarnish the significance of their results in any manner whatsoever.

      seti@home is a scientific mission. You simply cannot judge it on the same basis as scaling a mountain. It is a comparison of apples and oranges, and entirely misses the point of an intellectual achievement. Believe me, if seti@home actually discovers a genuine signal, it will rank among the greatest discoveries of the century, if not of scientific history.

      Bob

  • Wardriving aliens looking for open ports... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @08:53PM (#3426731)
    I find it odd that after being hit with waves of terrestrial trojans like Code Red and Melissa, we still think it's kewl to connect the planetary computer network to the sky via a radio-telescope.

    What we're hoping for is to find the big IRC in the sky. Careful what you wish for--those aliens might me more than just chatty. If they're ever-so-much more intelligent than us, think of the viruses some of them must be writing....

    • Nah... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      If they are really that advanced, they have no MS in their society, and therefore can no longer fathom the thought of "viruses".
      Or, it could be like Independence Day, where the alien society obviously never had script kiddies so our 1337 virus technology will screw them over and allow a few F18s to blow the hell out of them...
    • Or it goes something like this:

      EarthMan153: Hi, we're scientist from earth looking for intelligient beings...

      SpaceMan6969: Hi, I'm 163/f. do you cyber?

  • These guys [disclosureproject.org] make a pretty good case that it might be.
    • Well, their website got a facelift. Crazy or not, Greer is sure as hell dedicated.
      • The thing is, it doesn't matter if Greer is crazy or not - it's the testimony of the hundreds of witnesses that he's gathered that matters. It's possible that he's gathered all the crackpots that ever ran the Air Force, NORAD, BAF, CIA, etc.. It's also possible that he's gathered some credible witnesses. If he's crazy and he's gathered credible witnesses, does it matter if he's crazy? Is there any evidence that he's crazy or do you just disagree with him? (Crazy like Galileo crazy).
    • Ah, yes. The aliens aren't hostile, and they have the technology to alleviate much human suffering, but they can't find five minutes to land in Mexico City and reveal these secrets? They can't beam a transmission to the satellite dishes of a TV station announcing their existence to make a coverup completely impossible and help us?

      Damned bastards. I say we build armed spaceships, hunt them down, and exterminate them.
      • Ah, yes. The aliens aren't hostile, and they have the technology to alleviate much human suffering, but they can't find five minutes to land in Mexico City and reveal these secrets? They can't beam a transmission to the satellite dishes of a TV station announcing their existence to make a coverup completely impossible and help us?

        I'm not saying these guys are right, but you're certainly making the assumption that any visiting culture would have a very specific philosophy, very similar to a left-moderate American. Even Carl Sagan didn't think that.

  • I want to see the slasdot effect in their output (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dfelznic ( 8812 ) <dfc.anize@org> on Sunday April 28, 2002 @09:34PM (#3426861) Homepage
    How many /.ers are going to run over and start up a client in order to get 500 bucks. I realize not everyone is going to run over but it will be interesting to see if there is a spike in there productivity. I stopped doing seti@home a while ago, when the reports of small amounts of data came out. I went back to dnet, but I still did more than 85% of the people...

    If i get the loot I will donate half of it to the GNU foundation...
  • Hehege. Just watch it be my year and a half over due 3rd data set.

  • I'd like to help out more... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wiwi Jumbo ( 105640 ) on Sunday April 28, 2002 @11:12PM (#3427220) Homepage Journal
    I had Seti running constantly for over 2 years... but there are a lot of other projects I'd like to help out on as well.

    But neither one plays nice with the others.

    While I wish there was some "master program" which these distributive projects could plug into fact is on a Wintel machine you can seemingly only run one to any benefit....

    And if I gotta choose, I'll take fighting cancer..

    • It is possible to run more than one client on on PC at the same time. What would you like to do?

      As an example, you can easily run the Distributed Folding client, the F@H client, the Distributed.net client and others together. In fact a lot of people in the DC community run 2 clients, a primary client and a secondary client as backup if the primary client for some reason fails.

      It is possible to set the priority of a lot of the clients with ex. a commandline switch or something or in a configuration file. If you want to support two projects, it's a matter of tweaking the priority to make each client get ~50% CPU time. You would help more if you bought another box and put a client on each, though ;)

      Regarding the "master program" - I know a person who is in fact working on exactly such a piece of software. Some of the clients already kinda have that feature - the Distribute.Net client have 2 projects running, the UD client also have had 2 projects running and I know that Stanford are working on a client that combines F@H and G@H.

      In regards to fighting cancer, I believe you are thinking about UD. I personally don't like the way that project is managed. When you install the client, you give them the right to automatically update the client whenever they choose to do so and unless you configure it to do differently, it will also work on other projects besides the cancer project. That is why I currently prefer the Distributed Folding Project [distributedfolding.org] - it's a great project (good medical science) and they care a lot about users privacy and security.

  • How do we know that SETI @Home isn't a cunning alien plot to gain control of all our PCs so that they can take over the world?

    I bags the film-rights!
  • Awesome for Seti@Home. I have been active with them for years now. I enjoy distributed project. I also enjoy Grub [grub.org] a distributed search engine project.
  • Just infinity more weeks and wel'll have contacted ET!

    Fan-tastic

  • The value of the 500 millionth result (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Monday April 29, 2002 @03:47AM (#3427878)
    This isn't like RSA; you haven't hit half the search space when you hit 500,000,000 results. Statistically, a "catch" is no closer or further away than it ever was.

    This is seriously fictitious milestone: it's only meaningful to humans, who think it's a large number, and who think it has more significance than other large numbers because they happen to have 10 fingers.

    -- Terry
  • I thought it had something to do with "search for extraterresterial Intelligence" - untill it finds THAT, there are NO results, or the results are all comming in negative, "we've thoroughly sifted thru a bunch of space noise and haven't found ET yet!".

    This is like giving an award out to a gold miner who has processed 1 million buckets of mud and still hasn't struck gold.


  • Please folks, just turn those machines off.

    The distributed.net folks have made their point. A lot of machines can be used in parallel to break encryption that most people thought was infeasable.

    The SETI, Folding, Kazza, primes, etc., folk learned from dNet that they could tap a huge resource for only the cost of development, but this is a terribly inefficient way to do parallel computation.

    Think of all the coal or natural gas that's being converted into sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, plus hundreds of other nasty things you don't want to be breathing.

    Our culture seems to be embracing a tragedy called "Life Without Consequences."

    Wake up! That P90 you have in the corner running a pretty screensaver is using 250W/hr. It's connected to wires that run hundreds of miles, ending at a enormous motor powered by BURNING STUFF. Just because the consequences are hidden out of sight doesn't mean they don't exist. The irony of distributed computing is that all those machines doing a little work are connected back to just a FEW power plants, and that work is NOT being done free from consequences.

    We must be searching for extraterrestrial intelligence because intelligence is so hard to find right here on earth.

    -pmb

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