At 03:35 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
I initially thought that that sounded irresponsibly silly of them.Neo has been ping-ponging between working on RSA-576 and the Xbox signing key (2048 bits).
Now that I've read their web page, they seem a bit too disorganized
and non-mathematical to rate as "irresponsible" :-)
Some particular issues about www.theneoproject.com
- Their basic concept is "We'll run distributed computing challenges
and donate most of the winnings to charity."
Fine, but unless their approaches to the computation are good,
the main charities their supporting are electric companies and the
"Support Canada Through Global Warming" campaign...
- You have to read their forum discussions to have any clue
what they're actually doing when, because their
FAQ doesn't seem to be up to date.
- A distributed computing like this needs several parts:
- A problem to solve - they seem to keep waffling on this;
their FAQ really needs to be upfront about it,
but it only talks about RSA-576, while their forum
says they are or aren't also doing something with X-Box,
depending on their legal worries, but doesn't say what
they're trying to do to it (Cracking a 2048-bit RSA key
certainly isn't a rational problem to solve,
but maybe they're trying to crack something else about it,
like a passphrase used for a key file?)
- Some way to hand out work and collect results,
and it's possible that they've done this well,
though I doubt they scale to seti.org sizes.
- An algorithm that can solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time.
Their forum said something about Mahmoud's Number Field Sieve,
but I can't tell if that's currently being used or not,
or what it is (since it sounds like they were saying that
one of them developed it.) The FAQ currently says they're
picking random numbers that might be prime, testing if they're prime,
and then doing trial division, which is guaranteed not to get
the correct answer except by stupendously unlikely luck,
because it's more work than simple brute force...
- A way to split up that algorithm into manageable pieces.
Well, it sounds like their current algorithm has that :-)
- A publicity campaign to get enough participant.
"Coolness + Word Of Mouth" worked fine for SETI,
and perhaps if these guys were currently cool it would work for them...
Now, one of their pages suggests that all of this is really just a placeholder
while they try to find a good challenge project (presumably meaning one that's
small enough to succeed at that also pays enough money to make it worthwhile,
but I'm not convinced such things exist except paid grid-computing-for-hire work),
and if so they ought to say so in their FAQ instead of having unbelievable drivel.
Until then, might as well run Yeti@home or the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence
http://totl.net/STI/athome/ (hey, they've got a cool logo)
or else go to http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-projects.html
which has a bunch of mostly-real distributed computing
(and distributed human-attention-based) projects.
(Minor note: Some of those projects are charity-donation things,
where you click on the page and their sponsor shows you a logo
in return for donating to their page. The Landmine Clearing one
seems like a good politically correct thing to do -
the ad is for the "CAW/TCA", which is Canadian but otherwise
doesn't say what it is, but apparently it was the
Canadian Auto Workers union before doing enough mergers to be
Nothing But Initials. They've got a poster for their Auto Policy Campaign http://www.caw.ca/images/campaigns&issues/content/norules.jpg
"No Rules. No Borders. Government Asleep At the Wheel. No Jobs."
Well, three out of four isn't too bad :-)
