

The Public, Playing a Molecule-Building Game, Outperforms Algorithms - perfunctory
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/the-public-playing-a-molecule-building-game-outperforms-scientists/32835

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seagaia
I see some sort of internship process in the future for this...where they make
high schoolers do this for 40 hours a week <___< . I mean, if humans do better
on it, why not make it some sort of job, eh

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itodd
FoldIt (<http://fold.it/portal/>) is similar. Humans tend to find a better
starting structure while computers are better at refining that structure.

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sp332
The scientific method wins over mechanical application of top-down rules? Why
yes, yes it does :)

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gjm11
Right. The headline should really be "The public, playing a molecule-building
game, outperforms computer algorithms made by scientists". Which is distinctly
less interesting, since individual people (never mind whole populations)
_routinely_ outperform algorithms; otherwise artificial intelligence would be
a solved problem.

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jal278
It is still pretty impressive because these are biology novices, and RNA
folding is a somewhat complicated biological process. AI does outperform
humans on a regular basis, especially in narrow domains (chess, checkers,
calculation, now jeopardy)

