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)

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/ 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 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.