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

Unprecedented

[Bovius]

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.

Re:No Linux version and no source code

[laddiebuck]

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.