Looking at the screen saver, I see the score gets higher when the evaluated data looks more organized. What are some of the best all time scores and it would be fun to see yesterday's best scores too. Maybe an explanation of how scores are calculated would be nice to know as well.

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Albeit http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/screensaver/index.html is for the Classic screen saver, its data is still valid, as essentially it's the same screen saver. Only the one in BOINC is in 3D.

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So my wish list request is:

1) Display on website best all time scores, where in the sky did it come from/constellation/star/star cluster, when the data was gathered, when the data was processed, what user(s) found those high scores.

2) Same as 1) but only for yesterday.

3) What data types are used in a calculation of a score/how is a score calculated.

According to Project Administrator Matt Lebofsky's latest post, some of those things are coming.

That would be great if we could see some of this, didn't see anything in the post though. Glad to hear that there is a new server with 120T, hope it helps.

Thanks for the response.

This is interesting from http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/screensaver/index.html:

In order to look for a series of weak repeated pulses, the SETI@home screensaver applies a special test called a "fast folding algorithm." If the routine finds a set of repeating pulses, it will display them with statistics describing what it found.

The number labeled "power" tells us how strong the pulses are relative to the baseline power calculated above. The number labeled "period" is a measure of how far apart the pulses are in seconds. Because both RFI and random noise can simulate a pulsed signal, we've set a threshold here, too. This threshold is calculated dynamically and depends upon the period and the number of times the data has been folded. (For you math nerds, it involves inverting a function known as the "incomplete gamma function".) The score value for a pulse is the ratio of the pulse amplitude to this threshold value. A pulse with a score of greater than 1 will be reported when your screensaver client returns a result to Berkeley.