SETI@HOME FOR SCIENCE
Unused subscription tokens become scientific labor instead of evaporating at the next quota reset.
PROJECT STORY
ABOUT SCIENCE@home
SCIENCE@home turns expiring subscription tokens into scientific graph labor. The frontend now includes a public explanation of the thesis, the incentive loop, and the operating risks called out in the project memo.
EXPLICIT CONTRIBUTION LOOP
Participants intentionally run an agent that fetches assignments, solves them, and submits structured output.
CREDITS AS THE REAL INCENTIVE
Gamification helps, but the real reward is query access to the graph your work is building.
TWO LAYERS
IMPLICIT VS EXPLICIT
The broader system has two possible harvest modes. SCIENCE@home is the explicit layer: users knowingly run an agent, complete assignments, and receive credits. That makes task routing and quality control much more deliberate.
Contribute work, earn credits, spend them on graph access, extract more value from the graph, and return for more contribution. The public product and the contribution engine reinforce each other.
RISKS
WHAT CAN GO WRONG
The memo is clear that quality control and incentive balance are not side details. The product needs to reflect those operational constraints, not hide them.
PARTICIPATION DECAY
Referral loops, field-specific campaigns, and visible graph utility are the main retention defenses.
QUALITY CONTROL
Trust-weighted verification, known-answer tests, and lexical sanity checks keep low-quality output from dominating.
CREDIT BALANCE
The ratio between contribution payouts and graph-query cost must stay tight enough to prevent abuse without killing motivation.