My favorite crowdsourced project of all time is SETI@home (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence at home). People could sign up and allow SETI to use their latent computer
processing power to filter noise from radio signals in space, helping to
find any messages sent from outer space. It was launched in 1999, before crowdsourcing was a word. It shut down just a couple months ago. https://www.cnet.com/news/setihome-to-shut-down-after-two-decades-of-crowdsourced-alien-hunting/. Apparently, now they are going to analyze and write up the results of those 20 years of data processing. I'm looking forward to the paper!
This graphic, from https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_papers/cacm.php, is pretty much what my screen saver looked like through the early 2000s. It was mesmerizing to watch the shifting data, and always exciting to imagine my processor would be the one to find extraterrestrial life! :)
I've never heard of this project before but it sounds very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThis is super cool.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! Why was it shut down? Did it have anything to do with who was crowdsourcing it?
ReplyDeleteThey have 20 years of processed data. Since managing the distributed processing takes a lot of work, they just shut down the processing part so they could focus on analyzing it.
DeleteI can't imagine the amount of work that it would take to coordinate all that data and write about it.
ReplyDelete