I'm a recent member of worldcommunitygrid.org, (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/) , member of the team KivaFriends.org

What makes it strange is that to solve a problem, we run a lot of simulations / calculations. The thing is, do they (the scientest), in a sense, create a virtual world (mathematic model)and let the computer run all the combination?

Is it like the game Incredible Machines where there is no right or wrong answer, just work or didn't work. The programmers didn't code the solution, they just code how each object behave.

So this is the big question - do scientist code how a cell behave? How protein behave? If not, how do they model the simulation? Is it like those metal plate cutter machines / or 3d model unwrap, where the CPU will calculate and arrange the most optimize way based on rules and input?

Can anyone explain, in plain english?

PS - how do you find an extraterrestrial message in SETI@home data, how do you know it's extraterrestrial in the first place? Is it like looking for something, but you doesn't even know what the thing is, or how does it look like. We don't want 10 century from now aliens finally arrive only to say

"I can't believe we have to travel this far to tell you - start a DolphinTalk@Home grid project because we've been trying to communicate through it for a long time!!! gah!!!!!"

For those with extra CPU power, plese join the project and the team, thanks.

[Edited by - Obscure on June 3, 2010 11:44:14 AM]

I don't know about biological research and simulation, but SETI is pretty simple. What they are looking for is a signal in the background noise. A signal looks like a bell shaped curve when you graph it. It gets stronger when the antenna moves over the signal source, then it peaks and drops off again.

SETI@Home looks for such bell-shaped curves inside a metric crapton of data. All bell-shaped signals are then sent back to SETI and they try to figure out what that signal is. Of course, it's usually natural sources, satelites, etcetera.