Gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years (2011)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/09/18/computer-gamers-solve-problem-in-aids-research-that-puzzled-scientists-for-years/

by sparktherapy • 13 years ago

18 6 13 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

gafdlo• 13 years ago

This made me think of Dragon Ball's Spirit Bomb somehow

Osiris• 13 years ago

Wasn't something like this the premise for a character in Stargate Universe? The math wizz kid gets recruited because he solves a puzzle in a game they thought was impossible.

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

That was likely an homage to the 1984 film The Last Starfighter -- a teenager gets recruited "by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war" via being the top scorer on an arcade game.

cfontes• 13 years ago

Read the update at the bottom of the page, it has a very important observation.

"Update: Stephen Curry, who works on protein structures, had this to say about the paper: “Credit where it’s due: this is certainly an innovative approach to the problem of determining crystal structures of proteins. And I do like the idea of ‘citizen science’. Although it’s probably questionable how much science the gamers are understanding, the involvement in this sort of research, even if it is just at the level of playing a game, is undoubtedly a good thing.”

Curry also points out that a structure for this protein was published in 2003 using a different method called nuclear magnetic resonance. Khatib says that this is “quite inaccurate” and that people have struggled to use it to progress any further, but Curry says that they don’t say much about the differences between the old and new structures.

Likewise, Khatib doesn’t mention how closely related the M-PMV protease and the HIV ones are. “This information is crucial for deciding whether a structure of M-PMV protease is going to be any use as a template for the design of novel classes of drug targeted to HIV protease. If I had reviewed this paper, I would have asked for that information to be included because it is needed to make sense of observed differences in structure,” he says."

karlhwhite• 13 years ago

Definitely an important observation, but I am very intrigued as to how this will progress in the future. If the level of accuracy can be determined by gamification of known protein structures, then I would love to see some metrics.

I would certainly love to see a world where complex problems are solved with the aid of the collective pursuit of very skilled and bright laymen/gamers. There are a lot of very clever and talented people in the world who, due to varying circumstances, are not in a position to put their problem-solving savvy to good use.

joveian• 13 years ago

I played with fold.it a bit and my sense is that the implication of this article that random gamers are solving the problems isn't really correct; it seemed like most of the highest scoring individuals were either students or professionals in related fields. The game itself is not at all self-explanatory and it is not even always possible to follow what you are supposed to do without a solid background or quite a bit of study outside the game.

Gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years (2011)

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