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:----Joke-----

[oever]

No, it's the other way around. There are many ways to fold it so folding is easy. But there is only one solution with the lowest (free) energy. The number of ways to fold is very large. To determine if your solution is the lowest, you have to check all possible ways of folding. So in this game, they'll let you fold and if you are better than all the human and computer opponents for a certain period, you probably get some points.

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

[mweather]

Folding@Home on my PS3 take a couple hours at least per nanosecond of folding. A work unit is not a fold. It's a tiny fraction of a fold which can take thousands of nanoseconds. If a human can solve it in a day, that's a VAST improvement.

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

[Opportunist]

The "game" has two options to automatically "shake and wiggle" a molecule for collisions and misalignments a computer can easily identify. You don't have to handle trivial collisions by hand.

But there are certain problems that are easy for a person because humans can visualize and imagine a structure, something a computer simply cannot. This is exactly what this program is about. You look at such a molecule and can easily determine that bending it here or there allows you to crunch it further. A computer would have to try all, or at least many, combinations that you already exclude as pointless just from looking at them.