I'm inclined to believe it was just SETI@home. After all the other eccentricities they'd described, that seemed rather anticlimactic.

Dear Media,

The A Beautiful Mind guy is real, and he has a name. It's John Nash. You should start using it more often as, movie or no movie, he's a remarkable guy in his own right.

Agreed. SETI@home is exactly the sort of thing an engineer would run in the background on a cluster of computers. And a cluster of computers is exactly the sort of thing a guy would have if he were making millions through "investment algorithms".

I suppose he wouldn't have been much better off if he ran Folding@home instead. The article would probably have said something like "Six powerful computers were found analyzing the inner workings of mad cow disease."

Analyzing radio signals from outerspace? What else could it be but S@H? (I wonder if he had an F@H setup in his basement :))

If the media ever report on your life, you will find that it's even worse than you think.