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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.'"
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.
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.
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.