Distributed Thinking..
5 Aug 2010 10:13:38 UTC
Topic 195222
(moderation:
An article in Nature on citizen science..
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
Distributed Thinking..
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The same article has been referred to in the NYTimes and theregister.co.uk. But nobody mentioned Einstein@home.
Tullio
Well, I think they were
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Well, I think they were focusing upon the contribution to the problem domain explicitly from within volunteer wetware. In that regard E@H is not having contributors lock on to a screen searching for wiggles in a signal plot.
Having said that, there is considerable input from volunteers here at E@H to feedback and develop the software that does do the staring at the wiggles. Plus the mechanical/administrative aspects of distributed computing .... :-)
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) Actually I'm not sure how one would plonk our cerebrums in the detection loop for E@H. I did amazingly bad at the Black Hole Hunter game - which is an auditory thing and my hearing is fine, so that explains why I was crap at music as a child. No 'ear' for tone .... or my signal processing lobe is sub-standard.
( edit ) That's not to say a project couldn't be attractive to volunteers on the basis of being 'set and forget' ie. less effort not more. Is that likely to hold a larger potential audience .....
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
I think instead that people
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I think instead that people are more attracted to projects that give them some feedback on the project's aims and results by the projects developers/administrators/scientists than simply exploiting our "spare cycles" (which no longer exist, since people buy and/or build home supercomputers just to get more credits). I like projects where "they" talk to us, but of course they are too busy or understaffed to do it more frequently.
Tullio