h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi everyone,

I respect what you're trying to do here, but you may be interested in other idle-time distributed computing projects. For example, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, at www.mersenne.org/prime.htm, has been looking for big prime numbers for almost four years and has already found four of them, one of which has over two million decimal digits!

I hope I haven't goofed too much - this is my first ever post on h2g2!

Hi Aster,

Thanks for that posting. It's a nice suggestion.

Most of the participants are, ofcourse, already aware of such projects as GIMPS. A link to the home of these projects is supplied at the SETI@home website as well. However, those projects will, as far as I can tell, continue to run for a very long time, whereas the SETI@home project has been set up to run for only two years (we're halfway through that).

"Why's that important?" one might ask. Well, it isn't, really. Except for the fact that when this project has ended, the others will still be around, and we can always start helping them by then. You can't have two of such programs running simultaneously on one system (I've tried that, you know) since one will steal all the available time, and the other just sits waiting for spare resources, ticking away.

And what, do you think, is firing the imagination more: finding a prime that most people have no means of understanding anymore, or finding other life in the universe?

Anyway, I started this set of pages because I was already participating in SETI@home, and I found out there was a group started by Simon (HardBack) Owen, who at that time didn't show up anymore. I gave some attention to his project and made it grow. Maybe in a year's time, when SETI@home calculations have come to an end, I will set up pages about other projects, trying to attract people's attention. Or, if you don't think you can wait that long, maybe YOU should try it

Oh, one tip for your next posts: If you add an address like that of those primes, put HTTP:// in front of it, then the system will show it as a link for people to follow

CU again I hope, Aster,

The Mummy.