Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by willyg302 on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @06:42PM
(#8817418)
Related: this game grew out of Seth Cooper's PhD dissertation [1] "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games", which won the ACM Dissertation Award in 2011. Although a lot of the content is Foldit-centric (protein algorithms, etc.), it still has a wealth of information on game design and gamification, well worth looking at for anyone interested in game development.
Also, I just finished reading REAMDE, and Fold.it is extremely similar to the fictional APPIS discussed in the book. It's still a fairly untapped area, looking to games in order to gain real life advantages. Although besides Fold.it, ReCaptcha, DuoLingo and the ESP game seem to be using related strategies to yield results of some degree.
Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by nullc on Wednesday December 31, 2014 @06:10AM
(#8818935)
Last I heard the "folding" distributed computation projects were mostly only being used to publish papers on distributed computation; and not really to advance medical science... (In contrast to Foldit)
Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by jostmey on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @06:07PM
(#8817269)
Truly a great idea. Take human beings who would otherwise be wasting time and put their brain power to good use, converting couch potatoes of the world into research scientist. Not only does the lab produce new scientific results, but it brings thousands of strangers into the fold of protein biochemistry.
Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by chaostheory on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @08:37PM
(#8817868)
This has been around for about 6 years now. I always wondered what happened to this project. Good to know that it's still alive, though it's popularity would skyrocket if they ever released a mobile version on either iOS or Android.
tl;dr Consider that unprofessional moderation may expose your IP address, email, or other personal information and that others may be encouraged to harass you before playing.
Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by iamcreasy on Tuesday December 30, 2014 @10:41PM
(#8818160)
I remember an old news about Foldit from 2011, where Foldit players were able to decipher the structure of an enzyme that is the key to the way HIV multiplies.
"Gamers were able to do what biochemists have been trying to do for a decade: decipher the structure of a protein called retroviral protease, an enzyme that is key to the way HIV multiplies...People have spatial reasoning skill - something computers are not yet good at."
Strange thing is, if you Google "foldit HIV" or "foldit AIDS" - there is no follow up news. There are some new articles on 2013, but they link straight back to 2011 articles.
Re:Foldit – A game that contributes to protein folding research
by knowtheory on Wednesday December 31, 2014 @09:34AM
(#8819457)
if you read up on foldit they take a hybrid strategy, for proteins that are simpler, they are using automated techniques. For proteins that are more complicated and harder to solve where folding requires satisfying a variety of conflicting constraints, Foldit is an experiment in using computer assisted human solving.
http://eterna.cmu.edu/web/
[1] http://grail.cs.washington.edu/theses/Cooper2011PhD.pdf
Also, I just finished reading REAMDE, and Fold.it is extremely similar to the fictional APPIS discussed in the book. It's still a fairly untapped area, looking to games in order to gain real life advantages. Although besides Fold.it, ReCaptcha, DuoLingo and the ESP game seem to be using related strategies to yield results of some degree.
Someone's even trying to make the points awarded for time spent folding into a basis for a crypto currency http://foldingcoin.net/
tl;dr Consider that unprofessional moderation may expose your IP address, email, or other personal information and that others may be encouraged to harass you before playing.
Source : http://www.cnet.com/news/foldit-game-leads-to-aids-research-...
"Gamers were able to do what biochemists have been trying to do for a decade: decipher the structure of a protein called retroviral protease, an enzyme that is key to the way HIV multiplies...People have spatial reasoning skill - something computers are not yet good at."
Strange thing is, if you Google "foldit HIV" or "foldit AIDS" - there is no follow up news. There are some new articles on 2013, but they link straight back to 2011 articles.
Cited by 192
EDIT: Although looking through that link, most of the articles are about the technique rather than the actual discovery. I did find a followup paper:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v30/n2/abs/nbt.2109.html
Source : http://boinc.berkeley.edu/