This thread is outdated... I'm considering unstickying it. The reason the links don't show up is because John Vickers used his student webspace at RPI to host the images; now that he's graduated, that webspace has ceased to exist. I'll try to get in touch with him and get the images back (I don't remember what they all looked like).

I'm trying to find the time to write an updated summary, but it's very difficult right now - I'm in the middle of several projects, and Milkyway@home is just one of those. I'll bump the update up a few notches in my queue.

Matthew, this should help:

I have re-written this as an article on the United BOINC website;
MilkyWay@Home Progress in plotting the stars

Thank you John Vickers, you write very well about science. You make it easy to read!

You should install blogging software on this website, maybe MilkywayDomain/blog. Install something like WordPress, its free and it would allow you to blog properly about your project science. It would be way better and easier than trying to post it in forum messages. Wordpress; http://wordpress.org/

John.
Website Admin,
UnitedBoinc.com

(link that got lost when I quoted):
http://www.unitedboinc.com/en/news/1-latest-news/212-milkywayhome-progress-in-plotting-the-stars

Hi,
Maybe this question has been raised before and I missed it, so I will ask again anyway haha.

I am just curious as to how far you guys have actually gotten with the 3D mapping.

I realize that it is a very very big galaxy and will probably never be truely complete as it is always changing and new discoveries happen every day, but is there any actual partial 3D map that we the laymen out here in number crunching land can see at this time.
It would be nice to see what the overall picture looks like even if it is only a speck of the full picture.

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Hi, I'm new to MilkyWay@home. This is a very intriguing project. However, I notice that there have been essentially no progress reports for about two years! We volunteers might need a little stroking or maybe Seti@home would be a more satisfying place for our cycles!

A real question while I'm ranting: the axes on the plots, are those log-likelihood fit statistics? It seems to me that the convergence to better fits is insignificant. Also, how do you know that you aren't heading slowing into a local minima?

Hi, I'm new to MilkyWay@home. This is a very intriguing project. However, I notice that there have been essentially no progress reports for about two years! We volunteers might need a little stroking or maybe Seti@home would be a more satisfying place for our cycles!

A real question while I'm ranting: the axes on the plots, are those log-likelihood fit statistics? It seems to me that the convergence to better fits is insignificant. Also, how do you know that you aren't heading slowing into a local minima?

This should help explain things: Validating Evolutionary Algorithms on
Volunteer Computing Grids

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are an approach to performing optimization
of challenging problems in computational science, as they can efficiently find
global minima in challenging search spaces with many local minima. Traditional
methods such as conjugate gradient descent and newton methods quickly get
stuck in local minima and fail in these circumstances. This work examines how
to efficiently perform validation for evolutionary algorithms on volunteer computing
grids, using MilkyWay@Home as a test system.

Thanks, that is an interesting and clearly written report. It would also have been interesting to see comparisons between evolutionary algorithms and newton methods, etc., as applied to the MilkyWay problem.

Can we get a Map of the immediate surrounding star systems (from earth, sphering out to Gleesa 581) as a screen saver.....or stellar chart...from the data so far crunched?
Some of us can use it to study the near cosmos and learn more about our corner of the galaxy. Who knows, we can even initiate some formulas for future travel....

Just wondering, because it IS a pretty large galaxy we live in, and maybe 1000 years from now, this project may be looked at as the old parchment maps of sea wayfarers. Who knows, you may even trigger curious minds to WANT to fly to the next star system just by providing something as useful as that.

Thanks.

We are actually not interested in mapping the solar neighborhood - that has been well-mapped already (see the Kepler survey, the database is open to the public). What we are looking at wit hMilkyway@home is mapping the Galactic Halo, which is the part of the galaxy that exists outside of the disk.

The Galactic Halo contains far-away structures that are being disrupted by the Milky Way galaxy's gravitational potential. Since these structures are far enough away, we can use them to trace the matter (including dark matter) distribution of the galaxy.

Also, since they are far away, the data is not perfect. Therefore, Milkyway@home uses sophisticated statistical techniques to sort and analyze the data, then fits a stream model to the densities in the Halo. After that's done, we can map the major structures in the Halo.

See this thread for a current look at the Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Stream mapping that has been completed so far.