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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.'"
Who's to say that the wrong sort of mind will try to use this to make biological weapons of some sort? If it can be used to create beneficial wonders, it can be used to create terrible horrors.
Captain's log, stardate 41358.2. I am nailed to the hull.
Well, another quote comes to mind: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart, after failing to define what counts as obscene.
;)
In this case, it's the program which knows it when it sees it. If the atoms can stay in that configuration, it's a solution. It's not known in advance, but it can be known if you reached a solution anyway.
On a more pragmatic note, though, well, the problem is that a human dragging atoms around is massively _slow_ compared to a computer. A puzzle you could realistically complete in a couple of days (i.e., before Joe Average completely loses interest, for lack of any visible progress or achievement or reward), the computer runs through them in seconds or minutes.
So basically simple proteins that you can realistically visualize and toy with as a puzzle, have been solved already anyway. Even if you managed to find a simple one that we don't already know how it folds, Folding@Home would run through it in seconds or minutes.
The problem are the big and complex ones. And I'd _really_ like to see anyone folding a beast like Hexokinase by hand.
Or to give you an analogy, think of the game Atomino. Now think Atomino with several thousand atoms. It's not as much a puzzle, it's something straight from Call Of Chtulhu. If you even managed to wrap your mind around it all, well, it'll probably stay bent
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From TFA: "Baker has high hopes that the game will speed up the sometimes tedious business of structure prediction. But the part of the game that excites him most is scheduled to debut this fall, when gamers will be able to design all-new proteins. Novel proteins could find use in any number of applications, from pharmaceuticals to industrial chemicals, to pollution clean up. With the ability for any person with a computer and an internet hookup to start building proteins, Baker thinks the pace of discovery could skyrocket. âoeMy dream is that a 12-year-old in Indonesia will turn out to be a prodigy, and build a cure for HIV,â he says." ...But will that 12 year old get to own the copyright and sell it to the drug company and make billions? Or will the drug companies just steal it and keep the money for themselves...
This is the first time I've seen a project that combined distributed computation, using human minds for intelligence and processing power, and connecting the two with an interface that is intended to be entertaining and pleasant. I'm eager to see if they get any good results. If this is successful, it may set a precedent for using large numbers of people to crunch the kind of problems that computers find prohibitively difficult.
Wait a sec...distributed computation, human minds, pleasant interface...starting to sound like teh Matrix.
But letting people "game" certain types of folds permits these folds the ability to be removed from further calculation, right? You would be making progress either way. Personally, I think it would be cool if you could disguise the folding in other games like FPS where shooting certain bots triggers a fold of a certain kind on you, the protein molecule. Make the calculation minute and let some gamer perform it as many times as they want checking to see if it works or not.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm one of the game creators; and there IS a linux version, I use it every day, but somehow the story broke a day too early. Just hang on, please.
Actually, this reminds me of a short-story(can't remember if it was Gibson or Sterling) about drug-company employees using VR gear to test molecule interactions: the protagonist enjoyed the simulation so much that she refused to take a promotion(and played dumb on aptitude tests) so that she could keep "playing the game".
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Humans can imagine and visualize _simple_ structures, yes. More complex stuff, well, I posted a link to a picture of Hexokinase. You try visualising and imagining that. If you can, well, you have a better imagination than I do
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.