After March 31, a bunch of amateur alien hunters will regain some personal computing power. The Berkeley SETI Research Center announced Monday that SETI@home, the two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, is shutting down at the end of the month.
The home-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence project was launched from University of California, Berkeley, back in 1999 -- when the internet was still a relatively new thing to many people and the term crowdsourcing had not yet been coined.
