I haven't posted for while, but work continues apace.

Eric and I have been working on a "SETI@home Results" paper, which will describe the back-end algorithms (RFI removal, multiplet-finding, scoring) and will present the results of SETI@home. One reason for publishing such a paper is to make our algorithms public and get feedback from other SETI researchers and radio astronomers.

At the same time, I've made a big change to multiplet-finding. Previously this was done separately for each signal type (spike, gaussian, pulse, triplet, autocorr). The problem with this is that a constant ET signal could manifest as both spikes and gaussians: it would be detected as gaussians when the telescope is moving over it in a certain range of angular velocities, and as spikes whenever the telescope is pointing at it, regardless of velocity. Similarly, a pulsed signal could manifest as both pulses (when the telescope is moving slowly) and as triplets.

If we detect multiplets of mixed types (spike+gaussian or pulse+triplet) these will have better scores than the corresponding singe-type multiplets. They will be more likely to stand out from noise multiplets, and we'll have a better chance of finding such an ET signal.

Implementing this change was a major effort, since all the code was designed to work with one signal type at a time. I removed this restriction, and took the opportunity to do an overall cleanup on the code, including removing all database dependencies. I also changed things so that we can use the same executables for both S@h and SERENDIP; previously we had to compile them separately.

We'll spend a week checking the results of all this, and possibly fixing problems in birdie generation. We'll also create new database dumps; our current ones are only up to 2015.

-- David

Thanks for update!

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