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Gamers Beat Algorithms At Finding Protein Structures
jamie writes "Researchers have turned the biochemical challenge of figuring out protein folding structures into a computer game. The best players can beat a computerized algorithm by rapidly recognizing problems that the computer can't fix. From the article: 'By tracing the actions of the best players, the authors were able to figure out how the humans' excellent pattern recognition abilities gave them an edge over the computer. For example, people were very good about detecting a hydrophobic amino acid when it stuck out from the protein's surface, instead of being buried internally, and they were willing to rearrange the structure's internals in order to tuck the offending amino acid back inside. Those sorts of extensive rearrangements were beyond Rosetta's abilities, since the energy changes involved in the transitions are so large.'"
It's all 1's and 0's to me.
*woah*
I thought Foldit was actually a pretty fun game and a great idea when it came out, and now that I'm reminded of it I'll have to go back and play some more. It's fantastic to have validation that humans are still excellent pattern recognition engines compared even to very modern algorithms and powerful computers.
But to extend the idea more generally, seems rather hard. Foldit had the great insight to take you to an algorithmically close starting place and let you complete the final adjustments - in that way the algorithm itself is as much a part of the team as the detail or adjustment members they were talking about.
I wonder how many other ideas can be so easily brought to a place close enough that a human can recognize patterns enough to be of use in a final solution. I look forward to seeing what astronomers come up with...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Teach AI to copy human's best behaviour and create your own replicants.
Great idea, indeed.
I guess I'm not very good at pattern recognition, as I've tried to play some Foldit and failed quite miserably. (Well, everyone has different talents)
When humans have figured out how to connect their own brains in beowulf cluster, to harness the awesome power of the human mind, 30% of world population is going to be slave to corporations that need human brain power to do their bidding in order to do whatever that they do. But that's pretty much the same as it is now. But on the other side it really could be a nice job opportunity, go to work turn your brain on to some cluster be unconscious for 8 hours and go back home.
Using the abilities of gamers for useful, practical analysis.
Hopefully someone will crack that Ancient code any time now, and we can finally find Destiny!
Makes you wonder... Did the foldit guys borrow the idea off TV, or did the TV writers borrow it off them?
Do they really think that gamers are playing FoldIt?
That was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for to see how the ideas would translate to astronomy...
However the clients (or at least the client I tried) are not great. One of the nice things about Foldit was the UI for manipulations was really well thought out and made it easy to manipulate a pretty complex 3D object, also easy to undo flawed changes. In the galaxy matching game at the link you, had, I got one galaxy pair close to a match but one of the galaxy had spiral arms reversed from the real image, that I could not figure out how to correct for - and then after I clicked on "mass" the whole thing became an oval instead of a spiral, and would not revert no matter how I adjusted things.
I hope they are seeking some funding to expand work on clients for that because they could get some useful analysis from that I think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's all over their parents basement.
Score: -1 Eeewwww
Table-ized A.I.
You'd think gamers would rather blow things apart than put them together.
Table-ized A.I.
Technical Difficulties
Dear folders, we are having technical difficulties with the Foldit servers. We expect to have the game and this website back up working fully later today. Sorry about the inconvenience.
| Wed, 08/04/2010 - 19:55
Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popovi & Foldit players
So if you've played Foldit you have helped with the authorship of this paper. Not only that, but since it is a biological paper, you are a corresponding author (by virtue of being the last name on the list).
I would highly recommend listing that on your CV, or at least in your application to the Nobel Committee.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I figured gamers were better at finding carbohydrates.
Cheetos.
Have gnu, will travel.
We have lots of knowledge on rearranging structures to stick stuff in holes.
Sweet, I'll put that right after "Time's Person of the Year 2006".
It looks like the download links and the puzzles are all 404 right now... Damn you slashdot and your big shoes, trampling over those puny servers!
The primary problem with foldit is that it can't be just a game. Since it is trying to simulate science, the game designers can't simplify features to increase playability. So when player frustration sets in due to the complexity, there is no simpler version or cheat mode. You are competing against nature, and nature is a bitch.
This causes many people to give up on foldit after a short while, because it takes time to learn what gains points. What is cool about the game is that many of the best players know relatively little about biology. It's a game that anyone can play, it's just hard to do well at it. If you like logic puzzles, crosswords, soduku, chess, or Go, you will probably like foldit.
Does that give me a an Erdos number?
Can somebody knowledgeable about this explain quickly: what makes the real proteins not get "stuck" in the local energy minimums that the program keeps getting stuck in?
I played it for about 6 months. I was getting quite decent scores, often in the top 25 for a puzzle. Then they added awful crappy and pointless music, and wouldn't let you disable it (there are other audio effects that are important to have, so just muting the computer isn't a solution). Complaints were ignored without response. I quit playing before I started killing people.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If I were drinking anything, I would have needed a new keyboard.
Now if you reply, AC would be able to claim Erdos number + 1.
If the Andrew Leaver-Fay in this paper is the same one who cowrote "Faster placement of hydrogens in protein structures by dynamic programming" with Jack Scott Snoeyink, then yes. It gives a 4.
Best shot since I missed out on getting a 2 on Ebay.
What is the point of foldit? I have played the game, and indeed RTFA, however it's not clear to me what you are achieving by playing the game.
Is it just confirming that humans can fold better than computers? Or does the successful folds you make in some way matter at all?
If it's just the former, then it seems like a pretty colossal waste of time.
Good lord. Why couldn't we have used this in Biochemistry class?? Just last year they had us using this horrid program called 'O' as the official modeling software for one of our sections. There were some specific questions that had to be answered from the 'O' perspective, but everyone was switching back and forth to jMol so that we could actually see something informative..
I know I know, when you were young molecular modeling meant hand-crafted stick figures. I'll get off your lawn now!
So any word on if Foldit players now have a finite Erdos number?
The article is horribly misleading - it suggests that the FoldIt users came up with better structures completely on their own. What they were actually doing was improving the automatic structure predictions. If you actually read the Nature article, it shows comparisons of the initial model, final model, and experimental structures. The initial model has the overall fold correct, but with some gross errors which the FoldIt players corrected, leading to an even better model. This is still an impressive result, but it simply doesn't mean what Ars Technica says it means. The author sort of admits that Rosetta helped at the end, but it sounds completely ignorant of how difficult it is to even guess the overall fold correctly. I'm wondering if the writer even bothered to read the original article or just read the PR material.
People literally spend days playing WOW and other mmorpgs. It would be nice if they can integrate some folding, SETI problem statements into the game. May be we can find aliens and the cure the fun way.