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Princeton
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SETI@home
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Highly intelligent beings have taken over my computer and are using it to look for aliens. First it was my office computer.
Then the computer on a nearby desk. Now it's my desktop at home, and I'm wondering about my wife's laptop. No, I'm not paranoid; it's happened to a million other people as well.
Actually, we asked for it.
I am among more than a million people participating in a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The highly intelligent beings are a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley who are carrying out one part of the SETI project and realized they couldn't do it without an awful lot of help.
Facing mountains of data collected by radio telescopes, the scientists came up with the innovative idea of distributing the task of analyzing the data to computer users around the world. They devised a screensaver that would crunch numbers for SETI when people weren't using their machines for something else.
The project, dubbed SETI@home, has gotten off to a roaring start. The Berkeley team had hoped to have 100,000 participants; by the beginning of September there were more than 1.1 million. The combined computing power is greater -- and far cheaper -- than the largest supercomputer in the world. Now the scientists are expanding the boundaries of their search, exploring more radio frequencies.
At Princeton more than 160 people have signed up. You can tell who they are by the brightly colored graphs that dance across their screens as the screensaver works.
Captivating possibility
The selling point for many people, as the SETI@home website states, is the "small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth." The project organizers assure participants that they will notify anyone whose computer detects an alien signal.
Soon after starting, however, another motivation takes over: competition. The SETI@home website keeps track of how much data each user has analyzed and reports his or her rank compared to other users. Many people boost their rankings by letting their screensavers run more or co-opting more computers. There are mini-competitions at universities, businesses and homes in 224 countries.
The top achiever at Princeton is Patrick Min, a graduate student in computer science. Min says he started off in a friendly competition with his office mate, George Tzanetakis. Then, consumed with a desire to reach the top 1,000 participants in the world, he harnessed every idle computer he could find. He reached 435th place in midsummer, before scaling back to make sure the SETI program would not interfere with other work on those computers.
"The first reason you install the screensaver is the curiosity and the novelty of it. I mean, it's a very, very good idea," says Min, whose specialty is computer graphics. Then "automatically, you start comparing the number of work units you've completed."
How does Princeton rank next to other schools? Recently we were in 73rd place -- behind Harvard and Yale.
For more information on SETI@home or to download the screensaver, see http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/.