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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

21–30 of 358 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#23
Maybe the existing data contains patterns that simply are not in a form humans have the capacity to comprehend?

Maybe the path forward is not through seeking the patterns we were looking for harder, but in creating AI's that have been told that patterns exist, and they must determine the nature of those patterns on their own, until 1000 AI's with typewriters produce an alien Shakespeare.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#25
I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that "top" or "ps auxww" had a chance of fitting on a screen or two. Now I wouldn't look forward to unleashing an eternal, 24-7, intensive task with a connection to the internet, even though I have a lot more bandwidth.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#26

Is it possible to distribute AI training like this so that people could donate their idle processing power to creating a truly open source unencumbered LLM?

It’s harder because gradient descent is usually done with near synchronous updates of the parameters across the whole model on all training hosts.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#27

I snuck SETI clients onto the computers in my school. This is a sad moment — but I rejoice in knowing that it embedded the concept of distributed computing among nerds in our collective memory. Protein folding, weather prediction, and looking for pulsars as an in-game feature of EVE Online... glad these things came out of it.

You forgot the biggest distributed computing project: finding SHA256 hashes with lots of zeroes at the beginning.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#28
post #5

This is really kind of sad, SETI@home and Folding@Home were some of the first projects that got me really into computers and GPU programming. It was so cool to me in middle school to think that my computer was helping do a small part of real incredibly complicated problem solving.

It was pretty freaking magical, god I hate capitalism sometimes.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#30

Coincidentally I just started reading Carl Sagan's "Contact" the other day. Just getting to the part where they are actually building The Machine. What do people here think of that book?

The first book that really hooked me from start to finish.

Teen me back then lost a few hours of sleep reading it instead of sleeping on school nights.

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