I didn't find any results when I searched the forums for this question, so here goes:
Has anyone ever taken an actual task/workunit (or a set of same if necessary) and altered them to insert an "alien intelligent signal" of some sort, then let these tasks propagate through the seti@home system and see if a computer or computers somewhere actually detects and reports it?
What to use for the faux "alien intelligent signal" would be an interesting challenge in itself. What would you use - some digitized Morse Code or the fancy alternating frame carrier/harmonic TV signal described in Contact?
I'm just really curious of the efficacy of this monumental, unending task and how it is tested.
Thanks,
Win

The part of the process we are involved in has been "thrashed to death" over a good few years, and many millions of user-hours.
But, we are only doing the first stage of the screening, getting rid of the 99.999% of dross to leave the 0.001% of signals worthy of further investigation.
It is only recently that the next stage of the process started to be developed with the advent of the "Nebula" project, this does a mammoth correlation job on our output to further reduce the pile to something more manageable (the theory of what to do has been around for a good few years, but nobody had the time or funding to do it)
It is highly unlikely that we ever get to the point of being able to decode a signal into something meaningful as the degradation is so massive due to the vast distances and times involved.

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

Read the Nebula threads. Yes they inject fake signals for testing.