

Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years - adeelarshad82
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393200,00.asp

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kia
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...](http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2119.html)

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

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cooperadymas
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>

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kaybe
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.

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

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kaybe
Is it really? I thought it only gave a new capcha, without me giving a reason.
I mean, there is a difference between being unable to read a word because it's
so mangled and not being able to type something because I don't have that
typeset installed / can't read the language.

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tokenadult
Previous HN discussion about a different report of this same finding:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044>

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simon_weber
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.

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

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ohboy
looked interesting, but they want my email before they'll let me even try the
tutorial. Disappointing.

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danso
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/>

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

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soheildb
this is a perfect exame of human computation

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

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mstroeck
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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sliverstorm
It is true, at its core it is a form of computation. Though it blurs the line
a little- the human brain isn't exactly pushing around numbers.

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seako
to be fair your computer isn't exactly pushing around numbers either. your
computer does the same thing your nervous system does: push around electrical
signals.

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Macsenour
Gameification - just another example.

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vlad99
Maybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.

