Gaming cancer: How citizen science games could help cure disease
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
If you can simplify the problem/solution space into a puzzle, give me a leaderboard to compete against, more specifically let me compete against the people I care about, and give it the barest amount of polish, it's the kind of thing someone like me would obsess over.
Take my money.
I thought Zachtronics had given up making games for some reason. Or did I dream that, if I did that would be really weird.
But being the completionist that I am, I stopped playing it once I got to a level I wasn’t able to perfectly optimize across all three measurements.
They are indeed "real," bonafide (though perhaps sophomoric) programming problems. There is an Exapunks puzzle that has you implement a form of binary tree search/traversal in assembly.
"Paradigm Shift in Designing Therapeutics
This kind of work isn’t possible with computers alone. The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can’t solve this problem efficiently. However, humans are unparalleled at recognizing patterns. As Kim points out, computers don’t go into discussion forums to exchange ideas on how to push forward, but Eterna’s players do. They also constantly pick up on each other’s designs and then work to improve them.
“The players are designing things at incredibly granular levels while staying in touch with all the complex biological rules that we impose on them,” he says. “It’s allowing us to solve this incredibly complex problem through a video game interface. I honestly don’t think a lot of players fully understand the complexity of the problems that they’re addressing.”" https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/a-game-playing-app-m...
I mean the first sentence about enumeration and efficiency just shows how shallow the discover article is; the whole area of optimization is about efficiently finding optimal solutions without enumerating all possibilities.
To be honest this is the kind of science journalism quote which hurts science journalism a lot. Not only is it plainly false, the explanation is even worse. Any normal person reading this paragraph can not possibly come away with a correct understanding of the issue involved.
>The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can’t solve this problem efficiently.
The number of ways to go from city A to city B is also not enumerable by any computer. Yet efficient algorithms to find a good path exist. Clearly the size of the problem space is not the issue.
Did we jump 5 months into the future where $60 is the norm?
I’m guess this is probably aimed at the standard academic market, but even so more books like this could maybe help tackle cancer.
That and not having toxic drinking water from PFAS
Why?
Because they try too hard, since their main objective is not to be a good game.
It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.
You might be exaggerating just a wee bit. Oregon Trail is the epitome of an educational game with lasting popularity, having been around pretty much as long as PCs. There are others -- Carmen Sandiego comes quickly to mind, and arguably even Kerbal Space Program. I'm sure some actual searching could compile a decent list.
Imagine playing within the parameters and finding a combination that brings unexpected results. It's probably harder to design than a standard game, but I think there's potential to have something pretty entertaining otherwise.
Seeing a planet on the map appear close but be invisible, then turning into my whole view really helped me grasp the distance between bodies in space. And KSP is scaled down!
Reading about stalls helps but crashing the tutorial Cessna twelve times really helps you understand what a stall is and why it happens.
It taught me a lot of (simplified) country locations and population sizes.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's how I understood parents comment.
Cue John Galt's 100-pages monologue at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
The protein folding games paved the way to AlphaFold.
You take that back, I loved educational games as a kid! There were indeed plenty of crappy ones out there, but some were really well-made. For example, Pink Panther's Passport to Peril was a charming point-and-click adventure that taught you about cultures in other countries.
There's a small cult following in the Netherlands for these types of edutainment games and a small group of people have set out to archive all of them: https://nationaalarchiefeducatievegames.nl/
All educational games and all PHENOMENAL.