SETI venture plagued by cheating

There's something fishy about the search for alien life...

SETI@home administrators are allegedly ignoring claims that the project is being sabotaged by cheats. SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is one of the highest-profile distributed computing ventures - with an avid following worldwide. However, its US administrators are ignoring allegations that cheating in the competition to contribute the most computing power to the project is rife. With the competition's close just two months away, observers believe that long-time leader ARS Technica-sponsored Team Lamb Chop (ATLC) will lose its lead to relative newcomer to the leader-board, SETI@Netherlands, in 10 days. Competition veterans and even SETI@Netherlands own manager think the team's late burst through the ranks is a little too good to be true. Opened in June 1999, the competition is a battle fought with CPUs and bandwidth. Each day SETI@home's headquarters in Berkeley serves millions of bytes of digitised space noise to the project's volunteers for decoding in chunks known as work units or WUs. Winning the competition is simple: return the most WUs. ATLC has contributed a staggering amount of processing power to SETI@home, having returned over eight million WUs. By May, ATLC had a three million WU lead over SETI@Netherlands. But since July SETI@Netherlands' production has accelerated sharply, closing the gap to under a million work units. Max Nealon is an IT professional who has followed the SETI@home project since its early beta days and says the probability that all of SETI@Netherlands' statistics are legitimate is highly improbable. Nealon estimates that a 1GHz PC dedicated to SETI@home processing would take six hours to complete a single work unit. He said some members of Team Netherlands are returning 5,000 WUs per day. Nealon says that would mean team members producing this much work must have 1250GHz of processing power at their disposal dedicated purely to the project. In human terms, that's around 1,250 1GHz computers doing nothing but running the SETI@home screensaver. However, according to Nealon, SETI@home's administrators don't want to know about it. Nealon has contacted SETI@home concerning the cheating several times but is yet to receive a response. "Basically, three years of work to get to the top of the teams and eight million WU later, it looks as though the top team is going to be beaten by cheating," said Nealon. "The people are only cheating because they can and there have been an awful lot of people who have spent an awful lot of time crunching numbers legitimately," he added later. Andrew Colley writes for ZDNet Australia