Beacon@Home

Beacon@Home
Project
Status	Active
Category	Environmental radiation monitoring; Mathematics (infinite monkey theorem)
Compute	CPU
Requires	GQ GMC Geiger counter (Radiation Monitor only)
Development
Developer	Skillz
Maintainer	Skillz
Initial release	October 27, 2026  (0 years ago)
Completed	No
Software
Operating system	Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi
BOINC statistics
Stats as of	November 5, 2026  (0 years ago)
Performance	1.37 TFLOPS
Active users	93
Total users	94
Active hosts	2,504
Total hosts	2,506
Metadata
Website	https://beaconathome.org/

Beacon@Home is a volunteer computing project for citizen science that runs on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Unlike most BOINC projects, which use volunteers' processor or graphics time for number crunching, Beacon@Home is designed to need "almost none" of a computer's CPU, so its applications can run alongside other BOINC projects without competing for resources. The project was launched in October 2026 with five applications: the Radiation Monitor and four "Monkeys" applications.

History

Beacon@Home's Radiation Monitor is presented by its developers as a successor to Radioactive@home, a BOINC project that gathered gamma radiation readings from Geiger counters attached to volunteers' computers. The Beacon@Home news post states that Radioactive@Home is gone and that many working detectors had been idle since, and that the Radiation Monitor gives them "a place to send data again". The Radioactive@home article on this wiki lists that project as active, so the two statuses should be checked before publication.

The Monkeys applications continue work begun in GoofyxGrid@Home NCI, a BOINC project that simulates the infinite monkey theorem. The applications were written by Krzysztof Faryna (goofyx), whose original source code is published on GitHub. The Beacon@Home developer reports that the original code was considerably outdated and was modified to run on this project.

Applications

Radiation Monitor

The Radiation Monitor reads measurements from GQ GMC Geiger counters connected to volunteers' computers and builds a continuously updated map of background radiation. The developers state that every reading is statistically verified before it earns credit. Data is sent in small batches while a task runs, so a task that shows little or no progress is normal.

The app is built around the GQ GMC-300 series, which is the only model the developer has tested. Support for other GQ models or for detectors from other manufacturers has been discussed as a possible future addition, pending testers with the hardware. On Linux, the BOINC client needs access to the serial port before the detector can be read; the project documentation gives the command sudo usermod -aG dialout boinc followed by a restart of the BOINC client.

Privacy is a stated design goal. The project says that a volunteer's exact location is never stored or displayed, and that only a coarse cell of about 17 km is shown on the public map. The developer has reported testing the map mainly with United States postal codes.

The Monkeys

The four Monkeys applications, named Scribe, Scholar, Bard and Poet, test the Infinite monkey theorem by simulating a monkey that presses one random key per second. Hits are checked against real English words and fragments of Shakespeare's works, and are verified on the project's servers. The project describes the Monkeys as a tribute to the Monkeys of GoofyxGrid@Home NCI.

The four applications differ as follows:

• Monkey Scribe types a random word of 6 to 13 letters, with each letter drawn completely at random. A hit is any real English word.
• Monkey Scholar plays the same word game, but types letters with English letter frequencies, so hits are more frequent and longer words are possible.
• Monkey Bard types one random letter per second against the works of Shakespeare. A hit is a streak of four or more consecutive letters that match the text.
• Monkey Poet plays the Shakespeare streak game with frequency-weighted typing.

A chimpanzee at a typewriter, used as a common illustration of the infinite monkey theorem. The image is not from Beacon@Home.

The theorem's scale can be illustrated with a simple calculation. If each letter is drawn uniformly from the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the probability that one keystroke sequence matches a given word of length $k$ is $(1/26{)}^k$. For a specific six-letter word, the expected number of random attempts is $26^6=308,915,776$. At one keystroke per second, that is about $\frac{308,915,776}{31,557,600}\approx 9.8$ years for a single monkey, which is why the Bard and Poet streak games are built around many simultaneous short matches rather than one long target.

The theorem itself is older than BOINC. Émile Borel used the monkey metaphor in 1913, and Arthur Eddington discussed it in 1928. A standard illustration uses a 50-key typewriter and the word "banana". The probability that a specific six-letter block spells "banana" is $(1/50{)}^6=1/15,625,000,000$, and the chance of not typing it in $n$ independent blocks is $X_n=(1-50^{-6}{)}^n$, which approaches zero as $n$ grows.

Participation

Account creation on Beacon@Home requires an invite code, which the project publishes as lighthouse. The project states that the code exists only to keep out spam bots. New accounts start with the Monkeys applications selected. The Radiation Monitor must be enabled in the project preferences after joining, and a detector's map location is set from the account page.

The project's home page provides leaderboards for participants, teams, computers, operating systems and BOINC versions, and it links to third-party statistics sites such as BOINCstats and Free-DC.

Development

The project's news posts are signed "Skillz", the name used as the developer and maintainer in the infobox. The project does not state a license, an organizational sponsor or a public source repository at the time of writing.

Scientific publications

As of 5 November 2026, no peer-reviewed scientific publications by the Beacon@Home project were identified. The project's applications are recent, and its Monkeys applications build on the earlier GoofyxGrid@Home NCI code rather than on a published study. General publications about the BOINC platform and its projects are listed by the University of California, Berkeley.

See also

• Radioactive@home
• GoofyxGrid@Home NCI
• Infinite monkey theorem
• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
• Main Page

External links

• Beacon@Home official website
• Join Beacon@Home
• Monkeys hit list
• Beacon@Home statistics and leaderboards
• Beacon@Home news feed (RSS)