Re: Seeking extropian opinion: GIMPS vs SETI?

From: Sasha Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Sat May 15 1999 - 03:05:26 MDT


I think both projects are pretty useless.
I am running GIMPS out of curiosity and for a chance to
win $50K from EFF (I'd rather it had financed my Newsfilter
project). Explanations why GIMPS is useful on their own
page are quite pathetic.

It's strange that nobody has found more productive tasks
that could be distributed among multiple computers.

SETI does sound like it has at least some chance to find
something of interest. I'd be willing to bet anything
against aliens though. And I wouldn't want it to slow
down my computer.

Anybody has suggestions for distributed computations that
would actually be useful?

Do you know any practical tasks that require high computational
power and can be easily parallelized?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
Newsfilter page: <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/newsfilter_plan.html>
---------------------------------------------------------------------



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:43 MST