By now you have probably heard the story about the ‘gamers’ that helped find a key protein in the fight against AIDS just by playing a game. Did you know there are other cool things like that out there?
I read a bunch of different stuff and a while back I came across an article that sent me to a place where I could get involved in projects like the protein one. Things like comparing historical writings to help decipher what was written and folding proteins and several other projects that thanks to the Internet a solution can be crowd sourced. NASA even has one through JPL that is aimed at kids, not that adults can’t play, it has two aspects to it and one of those involves helping to match close up photos of the Martian surface with a less detailed view. The idea being to put the puzzle pieces together to get a more detailed view of the surface.
There are also the projects that want to use a little bit of your computer processing time to help them sift through data to find something. Or to process data for some final result. These are usually what I will call @home projects. Many have probably heard of the SETI@home project. It’s been around for years. You install a little program that goes out and grabs a bit of the data and then processes it looking for something, in the case of SETI it’s signs of intelligent life in the universe. There are projects for space and physics, you can do the LHC@home project, or chemistry or artificial intelligence with the Free HAL project.
I’ve been reading about these different things for several years and always think I’m going to try one of them and of course never seem to get to it. This week I finally downloaded the software and joined in. First I joined in the Milkyway@home project. It has to do with making a 3D rendering of the Milkyway using photos from one of the telescopes. I was going along happily until no more work was issued. Bummer. It looks like they might be doing maintenance or it’s waiting on the next process to be loaded. Still I have a computer sitting doing nothing. So I have joined SETI@home and I have joined Free HAL.
Right now it looks like I’m running stuff for both SETI and HAL. One of the bonuses of the process is the cool screensaver you end up getting with it. Whether it is just the BOINC one telling you what you are running or the one that SETI shows, it’s still cool.
I will try to get the web addresses for some of these sites and add them to the links in case anyone is interested. If we can’t have whirled peas we might as well help look for little green men and the Higgs boson.