New Project?

[UBT - Chris]

Hi, team - I've been thinking (don't do that everyday ), and I thought that eventually UBT could make its own project.

Would this be possible, and if so, could be do a similar idea to Rebirther's SR Base?

If anyone has any infomation on this, I would be very grateful.

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi Chris,

It all boils down to what sort of data we could make available to the BOINC community for them to crunch.

In simple terms, we could make a project, say calculating the value of 2 times 2.

That would be very easy to do and we could award people credits for this.....but the simple truth is that this is not a "taxing" calculation and it would not inspire many people to join the project.

So, what we really need is a complex calculation, that can obtain "real world" data from somewhere, bundle up slices of this data into "blocks" that can be downloaded. Then once some user calculations have been performed on said data, have the result validated (against some known facts and to prevent cheating) and then to award a scale of credits, based on the work done.

Obviously, some projects are very simple, such as PrimeGrid (which calculates prime numbers) or Enigma (which is trying to decrypt certain WW2 codes). Other projects are far more intensive, such as MalariaControl, or SETI@home, which rely on scientific data, brought into the project from external resources.

We'd also need a pretty good server to host all this on (which costs money), plus some people to run it (who cost money, even if they are volunteers) and some time to manage it all, (dealing with technical issues or forum questions etc).

So, if you can think up a simple calculation that can easily be created, that a computer can do, then give it a go.

Personally, I've always wondered about the "infinite monkeys" theorem....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

The whole idea of producing (say) one of Shakespeare plays, word for word, by the totally random process of hitting keys on a typewriter (or PC keyboard) just sounds like a good project to do.

BUT (quoting the above URL):

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 {almost 2 × 10^28 }. In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small as to be inconceivable. The text of Hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters. Thus there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10^183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10^183,946, or including punctuation, 4.4 × 10^360,783.

Even if every proton in the observable universe were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons no longer exist), they would still need a ridiculously longer time - more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer - to have even a 1 in 10^500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 universes made of atomic monkeys. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers." This is from their textbook on thermodynamics, the field whose statistical foundations motivated the first known expositions of typing monkeys.

In fact there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.

EDIT: a quick follow-up:

There was the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, but that doesn't exist now:

http://everything2.com/title/Monkey+Sha ... +Simulator

plus, the Daily Mail claimed that 99.99% of Shakespeares works HAD been created, but NOT IN ORDER !!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... nkeys.html

regards
Tim

[UBT - Chris]

Hi, Tim

Thanks, based on what you said, would it be relatively easy for us to set up a project dedicated to, say the Proth Prime Search that PrimeGrid also runs, so we could contribute even more to BOINC?

Thanks again

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi, Tim

Thanks, based on what you said, would it be relatively easy for us to set up a project dedicated to, say the Proth Prime Search that PrimeGrid also runs, so we could contribute even more to BOINC?

Thanks again

Hi Chris,

It *could* be done...but is there any point duplicating what another project is doing?

And besides, we'd need to sort out some funding for this first....as the type of hosting and the bandwidth requirement (for all those WU's being up/down loaded) would be more than can be done with a "free account".

So, in truth, unless we can come up with something so awesomely interesting and "valuable" (as a project that delivers actual real-world results), then I don't think it's worth pursuing.

regards
Tim

[UBT - Chris]

Ok - thanks, Tim - maybe eventually, we will come up with something...