Hey, I'm relatively new here, but my school (NCSSM) is setting up it's own community network grid in a similar fashion, and they are allowing the students to propose projects. I feel that while many projects are worthwhile, the only ones that make the cut are directly math and science related.

So I was wondering if in a grid a computer is limited to what it can do internally. For instance, if I wanted to set up a project where each of the computers were sent a huge list of part of every combination of words possible in the English language, and I wanted them to run each of these combinations through Google and record the number of hits, and then map these results in a way to show that combinations with zero hits are complete non-sense in English and could essentially establish proper grammar standards based on raw popularity of usage.

This could be used for many things, but the first thing that came to mind was a sort of AI self-taught language, in which rather than giving it commands to learn from, it could evaluate based on the values for itself.

Obviously, the main issue I would run into is that ideally, the computers on the grid should only access the internet for three things: to check the server for work, to receive work from the server, and to upload completed work. People on dial-up connections would be seriously hampered by such a thing. But is it possible? Could such a thing run without bothering the user of the computer and is the application useful? This is what I would like to know. Any additional feedback would be appreciated as well.

Matthew