Game’s high score could earn the Nobel

Not to be a wet blanket, but the allusions to curing malaria and HIV are simply dopey propaganda.

Problem is, no predicted protein structure is anywhere near the quality necessary to do drug or vaccine design. This particular research group has long assumed that the problem of protein structure prediction is search-bound, and hence has been putting a lot of effort into things like distributed computing, and this. But there's tons of evidence accumulating that the methods that we're using to predict structures are just not good enough. Our understanding of the fundamental physics and chemistry behind this stuff is deceptively poor.

Now...it's certainly interesting to make a game like this, and it's not a bad idea in itself. But claiming that someone is going to cure a disease by playing the game? That's irresponsible. The true story is that this particular group has ongoing projects related to HIV and Malaria, and that if you play, you might contribute in some infinitesimal way to their work. Just don't hold your breath while waiting for the Nobel....

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/

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

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.

This is amazing. Someone needs to make a version where people don't even know they are protein folding. It would be like an altruistic Ender's Game. Only instead of getting a medal for wiping out the Buggers, you get a Nobel Prize for wiping out muscular dystrophy. Rad.

I'd recommend this talk at Google to anyone interested in sparking some ideas in the game-productivity field:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

It starts out slow, but it's from a guy who worked on Google's image labeling site:

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Years ago, I had the idea that the human computational power wasted playing Tetris and Solitaire could be harnessed if only someone could find a mapping between these games and a real problem. Of course, others have had similar ideas, as early as Philip K. Dick's "Time Out of Joint".

This sounds like the most effective game-to-real-world mapping yet.

Simply amazing, glad to see games worth playing :) playing this game might be good karma

Man I was hoping that this would be an article on GTA IV. Color me disappointed.