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The game you are referring to is Foldit. http://fold.it/portal/ I played it a bit back when it came out and it was an interesting game. It has even been used to find some protein folding solutions that had previously stumped the existing tools used to look for solutions. It doesn't beat the traditional science in every instance (or probably even that many) but having an extra tool in the toolbox never hurts, especially when it is a tool that can be used by thousansds of players with time to kill instead of a handful of highly trained specialists with very limited time.

I think this is a really interesting idea. A poster above who was a grad student who worked on an earlier version of this game pointed out that the goal of these was to find loop invariants in the software (basically a proof by induction that a loop does what you think it does).

With the recent revelations about the NSA backdooring common encryption code I have wanted people to work on something like this to try to 'prove' various software does what it says on the box (PGP, linux kernel, tor, etc). I am glad to hear that there is research being done in this area and hope it succeeds and gets applied to some of the important open source software in use today. Let the unwashed masses do most of the grunt work proving the simple bits like loop invariants and use that to free up the specialist developers to look at the rest of the program.

-AndrewBuck

And let's not forget that FoldIt is real.

IRL's approach seems to be: have gamers to do something they don't want (tagging photos), in order to get something they want (games). Which seems reeeally close to what ReCAPTCHA is doing (read unscannable words, so you can sign up for accounts). (Although tagging disaster areas will need more training than reading mungled text.)

And then there's FoldIt, which challenges players with folding proteins into a minimum energy state. This is key to understanding how proteins work, and important for understanding diseases and creating new medicine. In FoldIt, though, the work (folding proteins) is the game, and training comes as a set of tutorial levels. People can play solo for high score, or try to improve on the solution of others.

Just open up a website with a decent client (like FoldIt did) and I think you'd find tons of people would happily volunteer time to help out with a natural disaster. The problem at the moment is there's no medium to do that - the idea that we somehow need to trick or force people into it is skipping the all important "how much time would people volunteer given the chance?" step. FoldIt is a triumph in that regard, but the main thing is it's pretty straight-forward - they didn't think they needed to trick people into it.

IRL's approach seems to be: have gamers to do something they don't want (tagging photos), in order to get something they want (games). Which seems reeeally close to what ReCAPTCHA is doing (read unscannable words, so you can sign up for accounts). (Although tagging disaster areas will need more training than reading mungled text.)

And then there's FoldIt, which challenges players with folding proteins into a minimum energy state. This is key to understanding how proteins work, and important for understanding diseases and creating new medicine. In FoldIt, though, the work (folding proteins) is the game, and training comes as a set of tutorial levels. People can play solo for high score, or try to improve on the solution of others.

Either that or they read the news. In terms of value, Angry Birds is exactly suited to just killing some time - pretty much all mobile games have little to no real value.

I have to ask: What "value" do the games you play have? Are you playing something "gamified" like FoldIt? Are you at least gold farming?

Evidently we've all forgotten about http://folding.stanford.edu/...

This is much more akin to foldit. foldit is quite satisfying in its own way, but the learning curve is very steep.

This is awfully cool!
According to the article, they used Rosetta@home for some predictions. I wonder if they've also tried fold.it, especially since that project is also out of U of Washington.

This is actually a burgeoning field of research right now. There are several games that use human effort to solve NP-hard problems. The ones I know about are foldit (a protein folding simulation) and phylo (a comparative genomics engine), but I'm sure there are more.

I can kind of grasp how the amazing parallel computer that is the human brain can solve new problems for something like FoldIt, but I can't see how human gamers could improve upon brute force fuzzing and static code analysis of military software. Maybe I have a lack of imagination?

Anyone care to share a vague guess how something like this might work?

At the closing plenary for the 2011 IA Summit, Cennydd Bowles called out the whole 'UX' (User Experience) community as a whole, in that the role that most of them play is in trying to get people to spend more time on websites and buy more stuff, rather than doing stuff that really improves the world. You've taken a similar stance on 'gamification', but there's at least two groups (Zooniverse and FoldIt) using it for good as they're helping to advance science. Can you think of any other situations where we could use video games to improve the world at a grand scale, and not just simple 'edutainment'?

• Perspectives
• VMD
• Chimera
• Foldit

Etc.

But my question is, how much of this software will see the light outside the universities?

Impossible to answer. What defines a serious project versus someone's pet project or proof of concept? Then of those, how do you measure success? How many Sourceforge projects "see the light" outside Sourceforge?

Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?

This is the question you seem to be getting an answer to in the forum here. Hopefully it helps.

In that vein, FoldIt is a game where the goal is to make proteins that match target sites. Promising results get tested in labs. Same gist as what you suggest, but you get humans to play tetris instead of a computer trying random proteins.

Far from democratic. The FoldIt admins still determine which structure to refine.
Let us submit our own structures and work on them on our own (observable from the public of course), please!

http://fold.it/portal/node/267249

"""Foldit project was initiated with the goal of democratizing science, and we stand behind that. the process of discovery and the eventual results of game play will all be open domain.

"""

Not sure if that claim is backed up by legal documents. The game is suspiciously vague in legal matters. No software license. No EULA. Nothing about patents.

Or perhaps there is, but not released to the public.

Foldit has given out prizes.

This blog entry shows a 3D-printed protein.

They should probably also look into these.

Foldit has given out prizes.

This blog entry shows a 3D-printed protein.

They should probably also look into these.

http://fold.it/portal/node/267249

"""Foldit project was initiated with the goal of democratizing science, and we stand behind that. the process of discovery and the eventual results of game play will all be open domain.

"""

Not sure if that claim is backed up by legal documents. The game is suspiciously vague in legal matters. No software license. No EULA. Nothing about patents.

Or perhaps there is, but not released to the public.

Other groups have aleready made games out of protein folding puzzles.

There's already a "game" that uses people to find the best way to fold protiens. http://fold.it/portal/info/science

Another example of a game used for science is Foldit where you have to fold a protein. I find this example more interesting than SAT.

Rosetta at home is another and arguably much more efficient folding project. It actually predicts protein structures at high resolution, allows docking, and design of proteins. put your cycles there. Also if you like this kind of thing then try out foldit. it a multiplayer game in which you race others either collaboratively or in cometition to fold proteins. The games are chosen so the answers help investigators studying the protein folding process! The idea is to separate what humans do best--large scale long range geometry-- with what computers do best--fine tuning interactions.

Foldit

Have them play a puzzle game that solves protein folding problems that can't be solved by computer algorithms. http://fold.it/portal/

Have them play a puzzle game that solves protein folding problems that can't be solved by computer algorithms. http://fold.it/portal/

There is a 3d protein folding game called Foldit that would be appropriate:
http://fold.it/portal/info/science

It is an experiment to see if human problem and puzzle solving can be superior in ways to the existing protein folding projects like Rosetta@Home, Folding@home, etc.
But besides that you get to learn in a visual way about proteins and solve real problems.

Try Foldit. It's a game where you fold proteins to get a ranking / score (no money incentive at the moment). If you want to cooperate, join a team and evolve someone else's folded protein. There's also a duel mode, where you battle against someone else, trying to fold a protein in as few moves as possible.

And just in case you're interested, the folding helps researchers who are looking for ways in which humans can fold better than computers.

Be sure to include the relevant link ;-)

Seems like the editors aren't doing their job. http://fold.it/

All that's there is the windows executable and the mac executable.

All that's there is the windows executable and the mac executable.

http://fold.it/