Hi All

I recently received some very interesting questions regarding algorthms. I'd like to share these remarks with you, and please feel free to answer to them specifically:

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Put yourself in the shoes of a civilization who decides to so send a message to another star.

Wouldn't you begin with a beacon and code the message in the beacon?  Your object is to get detected - not hide in the noise.

In other words - wouldn't you go out of your way to insure that the signal was detected?

So, has anyone really thought about how to create a beacon with a high likelyhood of detection with minimal analysis?

I've looked thru 2020 and searched a little on line.  I see discussions of coding messages - but I don't see any practical ideas about how you would insure that the signal was detected.

Thanks.

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These are great questions. People have worried (and continue to worry) about the problem of how the SETI signal will be encoded. We are starting a major project right now that will lead to new ideas and algorithms (know variously as "DATA/API" or "setiCloud"). setiCloud will have its first release to the open source communityh on July 22 at OSCon (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010). This will be followed up with a specialized SETI conference in Mountain View, CA (http://seticon.com/).

Rather than answer your questions directly, allow me to point you to a paper we recently wrote that has a good introduction to why we normally search for narrow-band tone-like signals. The paper compares spectral-line SETI with a newly proposed signal type and an autocorrelation algorithm to discover this signal type:

http://astro.berkeley.edu/~gharp/documents/AutoCorrelation%20method%2017-Full.pdf

Thanks

Gerry