

Game’s high score could earn the Nobel - smoody
http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?articleID=41609

======
timr
Not to be a wet blanket, but the allusions to curing malaria and HIV are
simply dopey propaganda.

Problem is, no predicted protein structure is anywhere near the quality
necessary to do drug or vaccine design. This particular research group has
long assumed that the problem of protein structure prediction is search-bound,
and hence has been putting a lot of effort into things like distributed
computing, and this. But there's tons of evidence accumulating that the
_methods_ that we're using to predict structures are just not good enough. Our
understanding of the fundamental physics and chemistry behind this stuff is
deceptively poor.

Now...it's certainly interesting to make a game like this, and it's not a bad
idea in itself. But claiming that someone is going to cure a disease by
playing the game? That's irresponsible. The true story is that this particular
group has ongoing projects related to HIV and Malaria, and that if you play,
you might contribute in some infinitesimal way to their work. Just don't hold
your breath while waiting for the Nobel....

~~~
amichail
Other problems: the game is complicated and it is not obvious that this would
be fun to play.

------
msg
Here's a first impression.

Download it. It's Win or Intel Mac at the moment. You have to register at the
top right of the page (just username, password, email). <http://www.fold.it/>

I found this game very absorbing. Kudos to the team for making biochemistry
interactive and interesting to a lay audience.

With a little imagination, you can see kind of how the proteins are supposed
to collapse down. I could use a little more information about how hydrophilic
and hydrophobic play to raise or lower the energy of the protein. It's been a
decade since I took ochem.

One thing that needs a little work is the 2D control of the 3D object. Like
doing a Rubik's cube with your mouse, it is a little hard to make it clear
whether you are trying to pull to the right or rotate topwise. Adding
move/rotate handles when you hover over a piece might be nice, like doing
Bezier curves in Illustrator (creature creator in Spore maybe).

The About page mentions that these guys are trying to record human play in
order to teach the computer how to search more quickly. "We’re collecting data
to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make
them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks.
If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers
and fold proteins faster than ever!" Sure, there's some hype, but analyzing
human play and feeding the data to your agent is a time-honored supervised
learning tradition. <http://www.fold.it/portal/info/science>

One of the current features is to get things mostly correct, then press a
couple of buttons that make the computer search for the local minimum in the
neighborhood you've set up. That is, it's relatively good at the endgame
(probably faster and better than you). But the computer could learn a lot from
watching how humans quickly get the protein into shape when things are all
jumbled up in the opening.

------
menloparkbum
This is amazing. Someone needs to make a version where people don't even know
they are protein folding. It would be like an altruistic Ender's Game. Only
instead of getting a medal for wiping out the Buggers, you get a Nobel Prize
for wiping out muscular dystrophy. Rad.

------
zach
I'd recommend this talk at Google to anyone interested in sparking some ideas
in the game-productivity field:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143>

It starts out slow, but it's from a guy who worked on Google's image labeling
site:

<http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/>

------
jcl
Years ago, I had the idea that the human computational power wasted playing
Tetris and Solitaire could be harnessed if only someone could find a mapping
between these games and a real problem. Of course, others have had similar
ideas, as early as Philip K. Dick's "Time Out of Joint".

This sounds like the most effective game-to-real-world mapping yet.

------
redorb
Simply amazing, glad to see games worth playing :) playing this game might be
good karma

------
hoffmabc
Man I was hoping that this would be an article on GTA IV. Color me
disappointed.

