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An initiative to enlist the aid of
internet users in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Instead of
trying to make sense of the vast amount of information collected by
seti's radio telescopes by running it through the organisation's
overtaxed computers, seti@home parcels
out the task to volunteers. Thus distributed to numerous computers, the job
of looking for messages from alien civilisations becomes more manageable. A
similar approach has been used to crack encryption schemes such as
des. Unlike the des effort, seti@home has yet to yield
positive results, although this is not for the want of trying; over 2m
participants signed up for the project in its first year. In February 2003
there were over 4m seti users, who contributed a total of 1.3m years
of processing time to the project. |
