Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393200,00.asp

by adeelarshad82 • 15 years ago

149 24 15 years ago

This has always reminded me of the pilot episode of Stargate Universe, where Eli Wallace solves a real world complex math problem in a video game. Maybe Fold.It was thought up first, but it's a fascinating concept either way. It makes a person wonder what else could be accomplished via clever crowd sourcing.

Also see Google's reCAPTCHA project: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

kaybe2• 15 years ago

Ah. So these people are responsible for japanese, greek and formulas in my capchas.. they should really have a "I can't type this" button for more efficiency.

OriginalSyn2• 15 years ago

If I can't figure out a indecipherable glyph it's usually the word they need help with and if it's not a word I usually type in "NotAWord_<random text>" for it, you only need to get the one that google knows as well right. As long as everyone doesn't type in the same thing for the indecipherable portion it won't end up in ebooks.

LordLandon• 15 years ago

The top button out of the three (⟲) in the column is it.

JosephHatfield• 15 years ago

My impression is that even though the article refers to gamers, these players are unlike most gamers in that they may have extensive knowledge of organic chemistry. The article may be over-simplifying the amount of expertise required to come up with the solution.

dminor• 15 years ago

"Few of these players had any kind of background in biochemistry."

OriginalSyn2• 15 years ago

Nope you don't need knowledge in organic chemistry. You basically run through a tutorial on the "rules" and then you fiddle with 3D models trying to get them as packed together as possible to achieve a % which increases your score.

Cymen• 15 years ago

That meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter

tokenadult• 15 years ago

Previous HN discussion about a different report of this same finding:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044

danso• 15 years ago

It's frustrating how this blogspam post, and the news articles it references, won't just simply link to the actual game's homepage: http://fold.it/portal/

antirez• 15 years ago

all the pages in that site are identical to the home page. I guess there is some kind of problem going on.

Macsenour• 15 years ago

Gameification - just another example.

kia• 15 years ago

Please stop posting articles with link bait titles. Even the abstract of the original article has more information [1].

[1] http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2...

gort• 15 years ago

This seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf

simon_weber• 15 years ago

For anyone interested in games incentivizing people to engage in research like this, I just saw a talk this morning that mentioned PhotoCity: www.photocitygame.com. It's a game to encourage picture taking of landmarks; the researchers then collate these into a 3d model.

viraptor• 15 years ago

There's also Eterna http://eterna.cmu.edu/ - I think it was on HN some time ago. (also biology-related)

ohboy• 15 years ago

looked interesting, but they want my email before they'll let me even try the tutorial. Disappointing.

soheildb• 15 years ago

this is a perfect exame of human computation

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

It is less "computation" and more "pattern matching/processing", something computers are really bad at, but people are relatively good at.

mstroeck• 15 years ago

How is pattern matching not computation? The fact that you don't notice the underlying computational complexity is just a measure of how freaking good humans are at pattern matching.

vlad99• 15 years ago

Maybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.

Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

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