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TSR69
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Location: Republic of the Seven United Provinces
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 Posted: Thu, 15th Oct 2009 17:25 Post subject: Distributed computing |
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recently i rediscovered distributed computing (DC)
i think about 9 years ago i looked at the Seti@Home project for the 1st time
installed the program and had my pc doing some crunching for them
but at the same time i realised that i found the whole project nonsense
that is just my opinion which i shall elaborate a lil
if you look scientifically at the long chain of conditions that created our planet and life, the odds that it happened somewhere else are particularly low
now i am not going to deny the possibility that there is life out there
but even if it exists what are the odds that it becomes highly intelligent as well?
then if you look at the long distances that radio waves have to travel from other star systems i really wonder why we continuously have to listen to outer space
once a year a check up should suffice i should say
spending my spare cpu cycles on some nerd's dream is a waste imo
but these days there are many useful public projects that use DC that cover a lot of scientific disciplines like math, medicine, biology, etc
not going to make big advertisement here but for those interested:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewAboutUs.do
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Lutzifer
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Location: ____________________ **** vegan zombie **** GRRAAIIINNSS _______
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| Posted: Thu, 15th Oct 2009 17:52 Post subject: |
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well, the good thing about it is, that you can either do it or not. And the data sets wouldnt have been examined if not for seti@home, because the would have been shut down.
two points:
- the "odds" cannot be computed at the moment, because you d have to know more about other planets, odds of life coming into existence (physics, chemistry, biology) and other variables to at least get an idea of where the odds could be
- seti@home is not necessarily a tool for finding extraterrestials but also for finding astrophysical anomalies or rather regularities (e.g. pulsars), so even if one cannot find intelligent life out there, there is still a chance to find something different that might be worthwhile scientifically
i did seti and folding at university on some of the machines, but the problem is, that doing that will make the computers waste more energy, so i soon stopped it. This would still be more of a concern to me than the reasons above to not do it
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TSR69
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Posts: 14962
Location: Republic of the Seven United Provinces
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| Posted: Thu, 15th Oct 2009 18:04 Post subject: |
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i agree that the odds can't be computed atm
but if i can't do things rationally i do it with intuition and it tells me the odds are very low
nevertheless looking for other scientific phenomena is a good thing but this was not the original goal of the Seti program
other projects have been started to do exactly that without the search for ET, like MilkyWay@home
more good news is that the current DC client (BOINC) allows you to set the max used percentage of CPU time and amount of CPU's
so the amount of energy used can be regulated
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