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Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years
- cooperadymas 15y agoThis 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 http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
- kaybe 15y agoAh. 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.
- OriginalSyn 15y agoIf I can't figure out a indecipherable glyph it's usually the word they need help with and if it's not a word I usually type in "NotAWord_<random text>" for it, you only need to get the one that google knows as well right. As long as everyone doesn't type in the same thing for the indecipherable portion it won't end up in ebooks.
- LordLandon 15y agoThe top button out of the three (⟲) in the column is it.
- kaybe 15y agoIs 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.
- JosephHatfield 15y agoMy impression is that even though the article refers to gamers, these players are unlike most gamers in that they may have extensive knowledge of organic chemistry. The article may be over-simplifying the amount of expertise required to come up with the solution.
- dminor 15y ago"Few of these players had any kind of background in biochemistry."
- OriginalSyn 15y agoNope you don't need knowledge in organic chemistry. You basically run through a tutorial on the "rules" and then you fiddle with 3D models trying to get them as packed together as possible to achieve a % which increases your score.
- Cymen 15y agoThat meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
- tokenadult 15y agoPrevious HN discussion about a different report of this same finding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044
- danso 15y agoIt'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/ http://fold.it/portal/
- antirez 15y agoall the pages in that site are identical to the home page. I guess there is some kind of problem going on.
- Macsenour 15y agoGameification - just another example.
- kia 15y agoPlease 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.2119.html http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2...
- gort 15y agoThis seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf
- simon_weber 15y agoFor 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.
- soheildb 15y agothis is a perfect exame of human computation
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt is less "computation" and more "pattern matching/processing", something computers are really bad at, but people are relatively good at.
- mstroeck 15y agoHow 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.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt 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.
- seako 15y agoto 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.
- vlad99 15y agoMaybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.