From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 23:16:26 MDT
Emlyn, regarding your thesis, you might consider studying a phenomenon
that Greg Stock spoke about at E4, the effect of cash prizes on research,
such as distributed computing. His thesis, if I understood it correctly, is
that when a prize is offered for a feat, several times the amount of the
prize is spent by all the participants collectively in the attempt to claim
the prize. How many jillions are spent trying to win a Nobel prize of a
few hundred K? For this reason, cash prizes act as a technological
force multiplier.
For your computer science thesis, consider distributed computing.
The reason this is so study-able is that some distributed projects
such as GIMPS have available the amount of computer time being
produced as a function of time. see
http://entropia.com/ips/stats.html
You can see computing accomplished as a function of date and
results reported as a function of time of day, etc.
Heres where your research could go:
1. Get in touch with Scott Kurowski, the organizer of GIMPS,
see if he will give you the raw data that is shown in graphical
form on the site above.
2. With that data, do a butterworth filter or similar digital
filtering technique [fourier transform to frequency domain,
filter out the yearly component, then inverse transform back
into time domain, etc].
3. Use that data to determine how the introduction of the
cash prize, announced on 1 April 1999, effected the number
of participants. Determine if the claim of the first EFF prize
on 1 June 1999 caused the masses to lose interest and
give up, or did the publicity cause more to sign on, etc.
4. Determine if the *way* in which the EFF prize was
structured actually contribute to the overall effort, or did it in
fact, *detract from* the effort by encouraging participants
to leave the organized search and go off treasure hunting alone.
This lone wolf behavior creates a situation where the same
exponents may be checked by several people instead of
just two, decreasing efficiency of an organized distributed
computing effort.
5. See if you can figure out a good project for distributed
computing that uses idle CPU cycles. We have a lot of idle
computers on our list and a lot of open minds. spike
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