home: Why Does SETI@home Look for Gaussians

home, the first in a series of SETI@home[4] utilities, also uses POV-Ray. The symbolic representation developed for strategy was reused here. The new element, a signal source, is represented by a blue sphere. Since the purpose of this program is to show how signal strength changes with time, static images like those of strategy were inadequate. A different technique was used to develop animation in POV-Ray. A clock variable was invluded in the source, causing one of the image parameters to vary with time. The povray renderer was invoked multiple times with different values of the clock variable. An auxiliary C++ program was used to auotmate this task. The POV-Ray source home.pov is given in Appendix E.

Figure 5: One frame from the home animation

Figure 6: One frame from the home animation

Figure 7: One frame from the home animation

Figure 8: One frame from the home animation