SETI@home Yields to Pressure to Curb Cheating

[Balandar]

From: http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1106w.html#item5

"SETI@home Yields to Pressure to Curb Cheating"

ZDNet Australia (11/04/02)

In response to complaints of rampant cheating in the SETI@home project, administrators have promised to clamp down on such practices. More than 800 of the project's major contributors signed a petition after participant Max Nealon revealed last week that the number of illegitimate work units being returned to SETI@home has climbed dramatically. Part of this revelation involved the disclosure by SETI@Netherlands team leader Rick Groenewegen that 41 percent of about 8 million work units returned by his team were false, and he added that many teams have cheated since SETI@home was launched three years ago. Complaints of cheating from the SETI@home community were repeatedly ignored by the project's administrators at Berkeley, according to Groenewegen. Nealon stated that he believes most of the work returned by SETI@home's leading contributory sources is the result of cheating. SETI@home director David Anderson promised that the project would do its utmost to investigate suspicions of cheating, and delete the accounts of any user found guilty of tweaking his work unit output. However, he admitted last month that manpower problems would likely be given a higher priority than cheating. Anderson is urging contributors to help make the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing (BOINC) that will succeed SETI@home cheat-proof.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstec....,00.htm