SETI@home shuts down after 21 years • Hacker News Board

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#21

Post by dekhn » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #2

I have wondered about folding@home as well, another distributed project begun in another age that seems not, from the outside, to have lived up to its early hype. In the meantime, it seems that Alphafold has surpassed conventional efforts at understanding protein folding, including folding@home's. https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...

The two approaches aren't directly comparable. Alphafold predicts the optimum structure for a sequence, while folding@home explores protein dynamics (how a protein's structure changes over time).

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#22

Post by krick » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:21 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #11

Does that mean folding@home is next? I think the screensaver dying out eventually killed it. Also cloud computing.

Honestly, I never cared much about SETI@home, always felt like an empty waste of resources. But folding@home or even just training LeelaChess by community really feels like a noble cause I am willing to spend some electricity for.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#23

Post by cptskippy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:21 PM UTC

dpcx wrote: post #18

I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.

> Duron

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#24

Post by williesleg » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

Yeah, either they found something or discovered they can do the same thing with AI on a threadripper.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#25

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:23 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

sjburt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.

Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better. The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Ana…

RE: folding@home, How much money will the medical cartel make off of the fruits of all that free labor? Do users even know what they're folding? How do users know that they're not building bioweapons?

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#26

Post by adamneilson » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

End of an era for sure. But then there is this I guess: Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-deep-...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#27

Post by sitzkrieg » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #23

dpcx wrote: post #18

I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.

> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

the best part is that durons were better than celerons and cheaper for quite some time

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#28

Post by alliao » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:25 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #23

dpcx wrote: post #18

I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.

> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#29

Post by sprash » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:28 PM UTC

sjburt wrote: post #12

slg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?

Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.

The projects Primecoin and Riecoin are digital currencies that try to provide proof of work algorithms with (somewhat) scientific value.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#30

Post by tinco » Tue, Mar 03, 2020, 11:28 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

sjburt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home needs don't fit that bill.

Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better. The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Ana…

You could incorporate that in a quorum blockchain like Stellar (or Ripple I guess), but the whole point of those is that they remove the need for PoW so that's a bit useless. Maybe it's a cool way to build trust in such a network though..