Have they fed false positives into the system to see if they come out positive?

Could you please elaborate?

Cheers.

Let's assume that the software works as intended. A better question is : What is it supposed to do and what is being done with the results of all the processing? Also: what methods and by whom are applied to the results of this processing??

I have always assumed the brainiacs at Berkeley knew what they were doing when creating the software.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

The software we run uses proven techniques for extracting signals from noise.
As others have said there are stages beyond our initial screening - these are just as vital, but are the ones that are currently proving to be "rather problematic" in both their implementation and execution.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The software we run uses proven techniques for extracting signals from noise.
As others have said there are stages beyond our initial screening - these are just as vital, but are the ones that are currently proving to be "rather problematic" in both their implementation and execution.

I understand the methods are sound. But I'm curious if the software has been tested against a positive result.

I was part of finding Mersenne primes, and the last one was found, not because the automated software correctly identified it and alerted the community, but because the individual tester happened to be glancing at his results manually.

I don't mean to spread doubt, but I feel this is a valid question. Do we know S@H works?

Unlike tasks like the Mersenne primes search we are not looking for things that are recognisable, but for things that don't match the pattern of human and "natural", or should that be "stellar"?, events. For example, our screening gets rid of known terrestrial RF sources. One of the test cases for any new application is to make sure that these are ignored, and only "non-terrestrial" signals are kept for further examination.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It wouldn't be too much work, in my opinion, to intermittently send a false positive through the system for whatever the algorithm is supposed to detect (false RF triplets, for example), just to make sure this system works.

You could always try reading this

http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/about_seti_at_home_1.html

It's from one of the links on the front page with lots of other links about seti@home

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Life is what you make of it :-)

When i'm good i'm very good , but when i'm bad i'm shi#eloads better ;-) In't I " buttercups " p.m.s.l at authoritie !!;-)

There are also "test signals" that are intentionally injected into the system so the SETI@home team can confirm that the hardware and software is working properly at all points through the system.

Got the answer. Thank you :)

The software is open source, so anybody can test it, if they want.

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only "non-terrestrial" signals are kept for further examination.
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How do it know ? Does the signal require a certain doppler shift that coincides with the Earth's rotation?

I have always assumed the brainiacs at Berkeley knew what they were doing when creating the software.

+100

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

The speed of Earth's rotation is very small when compared to the "red shift" of the Solar system with respect to other stars.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Yes that's right but probably not relevant to the issue here. Depending on the Latitude of the Radio Telescope, The antenna is rotating at several hundred miles per hour relative to the Earth's axis. The signal if there is one would be a point in the sky which would smear into an arced line which for 2 seconds of data would be around 1800 feet long or so. So we would expect to see a gaussian -like (Normally Distributed) curve as it came on center beam to edge. If the source were rotating we would also see a doppler shift over this time period.

Don't really know what I am talking about but this seems like what should happen.