Long, long ago a friend told me that idle computer cycles are the Devil’s playthings. This was in connection with a program of inductive logic that he had written and fed with a bunch of facts and claimed that, at some point, it asked him if a platypus was a mammal or a bird.
So I was a little embarrassed to get home from the store and realize that I had shut off SETI@Home and Einstein@Home this morning, while trying to figure out why my computer isn’t as responsive as usual, and forgotten to reactivate the manager for them. Here’s the resource manager:
I’m sure you can see when I reactivated SETI & Einstein. The other cycle-hog? I recently joined another public computing project, the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime[1] Search) project. It’s been running since 1996, and yet I hadn’t heard of it until a month or two ago. The GIMPS software is delightfully retro for someone of my age and experience; I can’t imagine computer users who don’t understand, or at least like, a command line, would up with it put[2]. Here’s a sample from this Linux box:
Maybe their Windows version has a visual interface, I dunno. I didn’t see anything for this X-Windows box.
Twenty minutes later:
Yep, the Devil will walk away disappointed from this computer.
1 A Mersenne Prime is any prime number which satisfies 2n – 1, where n is a whole number. From all I’ve read so far, they lack practical significance.
2 I once read that Romans liked to put their verbs at the end of sentences as a way to heighten the anticipation of the listener.
