If I were setting up the kind of high-latency distributed virtual machine
that SETI@HOME has implemented (mmm, makes it sound a lot more polished than
it probably is...), one factor I would consider important is the
authenticity of the results coming back from clients. Now there may be all
kinds of encryption and checking schemes out there, but how do you really
check if the results are good, unless you can compare them to something?
It strikes me that a particularly useful way to do this would be to hand out
packets multiple times. The more cycle donors you have, the less likely that
anyone could collude to spoof the results. If results did not all match,
you'd likely discard the results (or take the majority answer?), and either
block those which send you false results from any more work, or scrutinise
future results from them more heavily, and degrade your trust rating for
them.
The fact that you got the same package twice is not good; not sensible. But
you could put it down to SETI@Home using redundancy to increase the
trustworthiness of their results, and that they don't have a good tracking
system for who received what packets in the past.
Really, even given a random distribution of packets with redundant
processing and no memory of past packet recipients, you probably shouldn't
receive the same packet twice. But that assumes that you are a negligibly
small part of the total processing pool... in the case of Spike, I'm not
sure that's a safe assumption :-)
Emlyn
btw: Why do you consider SETI processing to be more important that protein
folding?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Spike Jones [mailto:spike66@attglobal.net]
> Sent: Thursday, 29 November 2001 14:51
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Re: Folding@home 2.0
>
>
> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>
> > BTW, is anybody still contributing to the "Extropy.org and
> > Transhumanism.com" SETI@home team, or am I the only one left?
> > For some time I have suspected that these sorry SETI@home statistics
> > are pretty indicative about how the members of this list follow
> > through with their goals and actual projects. Christian "naddy"
> > Weisgerber
>
> Naddy, SETI@home ran short of signals to analyse early on,
> and instead of sending out a notice that they would get back
> with us as soon as they had new signals, they sent out the same
> work packages over and over. I received one that I myself had
> previously analysed. Even tho I think searching for ET signals
> is a far more worthwhile goal than GIMPS or even protein folding,
> I determined that day that SETI@home had gotten their last
> donated clock cycle from me. spike
>
>
>
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