View Single Post
Old 01-23-2011, 09:05 AM   #14873
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate View Post
More to the point, if they were that advanced what use would they have for us?
That's roughly the question I have for the UFO bugs. What's so important about us that a species who could do so would bother to pay us a visit? Frankly, nothing.

Quote:
Still going last time I looked...http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Got some hardware issues but everyone does now and again.
I don't think the program needs to find anything to be valid.

It accomplishes two principal things:

First, it validates the computing model. If you have enormous amounts of data to process, but it isn't time critical, breaking it up into small chunks and passing it around to be worked on in otherwise unused CPU cycles by many thousands of client machines is a good way to handle it.

The model is now being applied to other kinds of computation, like protein folding.

Second, it narrows the search area, and identifies areas to not bother looking at, helping narrow the possibilities.
______
Dennis

Last edited by DMcCunney; 01-24-2011 at 07:09 PM.
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote