Your mobile phone has the equivalent processing power of a 1979 Cray supercomputer.

And you use it to play Flappy Bird (semi-topical burn).

The flipside of the ridiculous, exponential growth in computer power available to everyone is the vastness of the untapped processing potential in your pocket.

The unused power of desktops is already being tapped into by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, to analyse radio telescope data as part of your screensaver … (I’m not avoiding work, I’m looking for aliens!) … and now Samsung wants to apply that thinking to phones.

Samsung’s Android Power Sleep app sends smalls packets of data from the University of Vienna for your phone to process when it charges at night.

(Despite the noble content, it’s dangerously close to the
piss-take generic corporate video I posted last week)

The particular data your phone is processing is protein folding, which is regarded as one of the hardest problems…