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The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it's running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life. Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.
Now your computer can dream of other machines too. Today's Wired News carries a piece about, not SETI, but NETI.
Neti@home is named after the University of California at Berkeley's SETI@home project, which uses volunteer computing power to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI distributes data collected from a high-powered radio telescope in Puerto Rico to millions of computers around the world, borrowing their processing power to analyze the data for potential evidence of extraterrestrial communications or activity.
"With NETI, we're searching for network intelligence -- intelligence about the way the Internet works so we can make it work better," said Simpson.
NETI to Examine Net's Strengths By Michelle Delio, Wired News | 02:00 AM Apr. 27, 2004 PT
