| Project Information | Category | Completion Date | Project Duration | Total Number of Participants/Computers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| the smallest remaining Sierpinski problem candidate k=4847 project searched for prime numbers of the form 4847.2n+1 for n > 1,000,000 (n <= 1,000,000 had already been checked). The project was coordinated by Payam Samidoost, an active researcher of Fermat numbers. It used George Woltman's PRP software. The project was merged with the Seventeen or Bust project in November, 2002. | Mathematics | November, 2002 | 4 months | 9/unknown |
The ECCp-109 Challenge was a distributed effort to solve Certicom's
ECCp-109 challenge
and set "a new world record in characteristic p elliptic curve discrete log
computation." The project won Certicom's $10,000 (US) prize: each of the
two people who found the winning curve received $1,000 (US) and the remaining
$8,000 (US) was given to the Free Software
Foundation.
After 68,228,567 total distinguished points were found, the solution was discovered to be k=281183840311601949668207954530684. See more information about the solution. Join a discussion group about this project. |
Cryptography | October 15, 2002 | 6 months | 10,308/unknown |
Care2's Race for the Pandas
had a
free button for people to click to save 0.3 acres (2.2 square meters) of
endangered panda habitat per click. The project generated 4,185,000 donations,
which saved about 1.2 million acres (about 486,000 hectares) of habitat
in the Wanglang Nature Reserve in China.
The project was run by Care2.
|
Charity | July 22, 2002 | 458 days | over 600,000/unknown |
| Give Water, sponsored by Thames Water, gives safe drinking water to needy people around the world. The project had a free donation button that it asked to be clicked 4 million times. After that goal was reached, the project donated £200,000 to Water Aid, enough money to provide safe drinking water for 13,000 people. Note that the original goal of the project was to donate £50,000 to help 4,600 people. | Charity | June 26, 2002 | 6 months | unknown/unknown |
Décrypthon,
hosted by the French organization
Téléthon 2001, decrypted
proteomes to fight against neuromuscular and other diseases. It compared
and classified about 550,000 proteins, and made the results available in a
free, public
database on September 16, 2002. The database website is available in
French
and
English. The project began in March, 2002.
The website is written in French, but an English translation of the main page is available, and babelfish provides a reasonable translation of the text. More information in English may be found at AFM, Association Francaise contre les Myopathies. |
Life Sciences | May 2, 2002 | 2 months | 75,000/unknown |
qoopy uses a single
infrastructure to support many kinds of client applications (similar to the
Parabon Computation project. The
site is hosted by the University of
Dortmund in Germany and is written in German, but an
English version is also available.
qoopy's first project, EvoChess, evolved chess-playing programs. Each user's client generated some programs. The more successful programs survives and combines with other users' chess programs to speed up the evolutionary process. Users could play against the evolved chess programs and see information about the best evolved programs in the stats pages. The last version of the project client only allowed programs which looked ahead 5-10 moves to survive. In the end, "the first evolution converged quite fast. This was due to the fact that the individuals faced an immovable enemy (the minimax algorithm)." A diploma thesis "Verteilte Evolution von Schachprogrammen" (Distributed Evolution of Chess Programs) based on this project and written by Roderich Groß and Keno Albrecht, is available online (it is available only in German). |
Puzzles/Games | February 23, 2002 | 6 months | 1,700 users/unknown (2,228,343 games played) |
Stephen Brooks'
Distributed
Particle Accelerator Design project designed "a channel of magnets to
produce a particle beam of muons as efficiently as possible from a source of
pions spreading in almost all directions. The pions decay into muons and
change direction as they move through the apparatus, making this a particularly
challenging problem." Before the project, the highest efficiency was 2.9%:
the project achieved an efficiency of almost 7.1%. Version 3 of the client
application used a genetic algorithm to improve its design and to learn from
previous records in the results file, so it found more efficient designs even
faster.
|
Science | March 1, 2002 | 7 months | 148/unknown (7.066% best muon transfer rate for 6,373,866,047 total particles simulated) |
United Devices runs
health, science, and Internet-related research projects.
United Devices' first completed project was a bioinformatics research project for the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The project, called HMMER, used the Hidden Markov Modeling technique to compare known DNA sequences (amino acids) against the data from the Human Genome Project to find similar sequences. United Devices' second completed project searched for potential drugs to fight the toxic properties of anthrax so that the disease can be treated in humans in its advanced stages. Any likely drug candidates from the project will be given to the U.S. government and other U.S.-friendly governments for further development into actual drugs. This project began on January 22, 2002 and the screening phase concluded successfully on February 14, 2002. From a pool of 3.57 billion molecules it found over 300,000 drug candidates. |
Life Sciences | February 14, 2002 | 4 weeks | unknown/unknown (2,867,618 results) |
The SaferMarkets
project, which ran on the
entropia platform, studied the causes
of stock market volatility. The project began on April 2, 2001 and ended
on January 18, 2002.
According to a Business Week
article, the goal of the project was to find a formula that can "predict
the likelihood, degree, and duration of volatility in the Nasdaq and S&P
indexes and in five currency exchanges where the U.S. dollar is half the
equation," first using Bayesian statistics regarding human behavior to create
a random fictional history of volatility, then fine tuning the formula against
real, historical data. Eventually the project would use the formula to
predict the volatility of individual equities. The project coordinators will
analyze all of the data generated by the project and will publish its final
results in economical journals and make the results available to the public
for free "to help people improve their finances through better planning tools."
The Safer Markets URL is redirected to entropia's home page, and the SaferMarkets was taken offline immediately when the project concluded. |
Financial | January, 2002 | 9 months | unknown/9,335 (970,885 tasks completed) |
DataSynapse built
a better P2P web searcher by joining with the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Lehigh University to develop an
approach called Hierarchical Distributed Dynamic Indexing (HDDI TM).
Participants were entered into prize sweepstakes drawings. The project was
designed only for users with broadband Internet connections and was only
available for the Windows platform.
|
Internet | December 17, 2001 | less than 1 year | over 10,000/unknown |
Popular Power searched for a more effective influenza vaccine. The company went out of
business
on March 17, 2001, but the founders continued the influenza vaccine project
until September, 2001. The client used Java for task implementation to
provide a secure "sandbox" area within which its customers could run their own
code without being able to acces the rest of your system (the way a browser
provides a secure area for a Java applet).Background of the influenza vaccine modeling project. The last unofficial Stats Page created by Mike Rosack. |
Life Sciences | September, 2001 | 14 months | ?/? |