As far as I understand it's a downloadable program that analyses data taken from something (not sure on this bit) to see if "aliens" are conmmunicatiing with Earth.
They program sends your computer packets of information to analyse wile it's not busy doing anything else, and then once they've been analysed it sends them back to the central computer, and you get sent a new packet! The reason they do this is because the SETI team would need a thumping great computer with a huge amount of computational power to weed out even the weakest signals hinting at extraterrestrial intelligence, and they can't afford to do that. So they accomplish the same thing using loads of home PC's across the world with small pieces of data!
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Date: 2003-05-15 04:49 am (UTC)They program sends your computer packets of information to analyse wile it's not busy doing anything else, and then once they've been analysed it sends them back to the central computer, and you get sent a new packet! The reason they do this is because the SETI team would need a thumping great computer with a huge amount of computational power to weed out even the weakest signals hinting at extraterrestrial intelligence, and they can't afford to do that. So they accomplish the same thing using loads of home PC's across the world with small pieces of data!
Or something like that anyway....
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/about_seti_at_home_1.html
Re:
Date: 2003-05-15 04:55 am (UTC)