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Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

pcmag.com

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Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#12
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.

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#13

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

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

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#14
post #9

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/

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

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#15
post #11

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...

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

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#16

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.

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

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#19
post #3

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

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.

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

Re: Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

#20

this is a perfect exame of human computation

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

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.
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