

Unwitting Distributed Genetic Programming via AJAX - psawaya
http://hampshire.edu/lspector/unwitting-gecco-2007/

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skorgu
Mininova tried this [1] and got something like ~1000 MIPS out of it. That was
using Firefox 1.5 though, running their IPS counter on Chromium dev on a
modern Core2 duo gives me 71428571 IPS, more than a 30x improvement over the
per-user numbers they cite.

Back of the envelope math: ceteris paribus that would put a 3-million
pageviews/day somewhere along the lines of a dual-Itanium box today. Facebook
pushes ~500 million pageviews so has access to ~300 CPUs worth of computing
power in the form of its visitors' javascript engines (~5,600,000 MIPS).

[1] [http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2005/11/17/mininova-the-
ja...](http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2005/11/17/mininova-the-javascript-
cluster/)

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nitrogen
I detest anyone who would try to sap my spare computing resources without
first informing me. With consent and full disclosure, however, I would likely
participate in such a system.

~~~
jjs
_I detest anyone who would try to sap my spare computing resources without
first informing me._

So adopt the maxim: People who steal my computing resources aren't entitled to
correct results. :)

~~~
nitrogen
My thoughts exactly :). I treat marketing surveys and loyalty card application
forms similarly, unless I really really like the company.

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durana
I've always thought this sort of thing would make for an interesting way for
publishers of websites to monetize their traffic. Instead of showing ads, a
publisher could make it so each page view meant a small unit of work was
completed.

A company could do business like an ad network, but instead of matching
advertisers with publishers and serving ads, it would match groups needing
computing resources with publishers and handle everything involved with
serving out units of work and collecting the results.

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unignorant
I like the idea, although it limits the kind of "fitness evaluations" that one
can carry out.

For instance, you aren't going to be compiling and running c-programs client
side... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084015>

