Folding@Home 2.0 - An Online Protein Folding Game

a boy named woo writes "Tired of justifying your gaming addiction? Now you can really help accomplish something while you play... thanks to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher David Baker at the University of Washington." In collaboration with others, Baker has designed a game, called "Foldit," with a practical outcome: players manipulate on-screen images of protein chains and attempt to predict their folding patterns. From the article: "'Our main goal was to make sure that anyone could do it, even if they didn't know what biochemistry or protein folding was,' says [co-creator Zoran] Popovic. At the moment, the game only uses proteins whose three-dimensional structures have been solved by researchers. But, says Popovic, 'soon we'll be introducing puzzles for which we don't know the solution.'"

Comments

Re:Well, the idea is to find out the solution

[blair1q]

Your PS3 has a tiny fraction of the computing power of a current quad CPU and triple-SLI gaming cards. Throw in a dedicate physics-engine chip, and a decent gross-solution partitioning algorithm, and there's little that the computer can't do faster than you.

It's silly of these "researchers" not to put some real brainpower on that.