
Video gamers solve a biological puzzle [video] - Osiris30
https://aeon.co/videos/video-gamers-solve-a-biological-puzzle-that-has-stumped-scientists-for-years
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fizixer
A much harder (for researchers to devise) but a lot more beneficial form of
gamification is 'implicit gamification'.

Why do you have to move gamers away from their favorite Battlefield, DoTA,
CSGO, LoL, Starcraft, or whatever games, in order extract value out of the
huge amount of decision-making going on?

\- Gamers play their favorite games.

\- The decisions they make during the gameplay get translated into decisions
about non-trivial aspects of scientific work. (This is the hard part).

\- Those decisions lead to scientific progress.

I'd love to find out if anyone is working on this, or what is the state of the
art in this area.

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ShardPhoenix
>The decisions they make during the gameplay get translated into decisions
about non-trivial aspects of scientific work. (This is the hard part).

It's a nice dream but I suspect figuring out the mapping from game to
scientific problem would take exponential time (ie be totally impractical) if
you're talking about unmodified games.

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Houshalter
There was once a movement to try to do this gasification for many scientific
problems. The problem is that turning arbitrary problems into fun games is
really hard, and only works in some domains.

However just now AI is getting good enough to beat human players at most
games. Perhaps most of this work could soon be automated. And even the games
that aren't very fun for humans could be automated. The computer doesn't care
about fun.

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mabbo
Deep Learning systems are great at learning one thing really well, given
enough data. Humans are able to learn novel things with limited data because
we can apply all the other data and learning we've previously done. And that's
the barrier to this sort of thing, imho.

There's only a (relatively) small number of training examples in FoldIt, but a
Deep Learning system would needs thousands or millions before it would
generalize.

Or maybe there's a great new research paper that will break through that
limit. It's such an exciting time for the field!

~~~
Houshalter
Yes but the great things about games is you can generate tons of data
automatically by letting the computer play the game by itself. Deepmind's
Atari thing was able to master Breakout within 2 hours of self play only, so
it's not implausible.

