Slashdot Mirror
Gamers Piece Together Retrovirus Enzyme Structure
An anonymous reader writes "Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules. After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Foldit players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks."
Kind of reminds me of "Ender's Game". #### SPOILER ALERT ####
. The only way to beat the buggers was to have a kid think he was playing a game. I thought it was pretty obvious conclusion, and wasn't the least bit surprised by the ending. Anyway, I think that this just signifies that we aren't anywhere close to AI yet, and that we don't even understand how smart we really are, compared to machines.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Really has to do with what you mean by AI. If you mean general reasoning machine, no we're not anywhere close.
If you are talking about solving certain domains of knowledge, AI is around us every day and doing very well! Jeopardy playing, chess solving, spam classifying, robot vacuuming, voice recognition, etc., are all some of the more visible expressions of AI.
I'm sure that, despite figuring out the protein structure, that the gamers won't receive any of the patent royalties that the patent will likely generate.
There is no substitute for human ingenuity, which is captured by crowd sourcing. Kudos to whoever managed to make folding protein structures entertaining enough to capture the interest of enough people to make it feasible. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What scares me is that a character from a freaking TV show has a far better, more fleshed out Wikipedia article than many (most?) prominent scientists. Not to mention other worthwhile people.
This space available.
Showing my age, but The Last Starfighter also came to mind. Can anyone think of an earlier instance of video game talent scouting in sci-fi?
Ask me about my sig!
According to Popovic, “Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries. We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science are taught in school.”
On the "just kidding" track: if that could happen, I wonder how the exams will look like? Will they resemble a FPS?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You've obviously never heard about Wikipedia's Poke'mon problem. At one stage, there was more about Poke'mon (as in, a ludicrously large amount more) on Wikipedia than there was about World War II.
Hence the creation of Bulbapedia. The Poke'mon Problem probably still holds though.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Your understanding of it is rather mistaken, please download the game and try it for yourself.
FoldIt is not a distributed number crunching @Home variant where a screensaver uses your CPU cycles to help with a massive parallel calculation because the upstream researchers can't afford a personal super computer.
FoldIt is an interactive 3D puzzle game (like what Bill the Cat's version of a Rubic's Cube would be like) where many human brains attack a problem, not their computers. The scientists already have super computers but they aren't much help in this class of problem, where human reasoning really shines.
According to TFA, the gamers are named as co-authors on the write-up in a highly prestigious journal, which is very nice kudos indeed.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Everything that those scientists or their contemporaries might post to Wikipedia would be deleted because it would be first-hand knowledge. How dare someone who actually *knows* the people in question try to edit the bios; they're not Wikipedia insiders!
FPS Crowdsourcing - Build better drone logic, add some humanoid bots, build massive skilled army!
RTS Crowdsourcing - Solve the whole 'nationalism and dick waving' contest one civ game at a time!
Racing Games Crowdsourcing - Design better robot drivers and automate all vehicles, lower traffic fatalities!
Angry Birds Crowdsourcing - Design better projectile systems for the military!
Farmville Crowdsourcing - Make the people that partake in this one play until they die from starvation, eliminating half the 1st world population and donating their wealth to people who are actually starving!!!! (Reverse logic on this one)
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Which isn't really a problem, in my opinion.
Wikipedia isn't limited by space and volunteer driven. If somebody currently wants to write about Pokemon, then they will try to write about Pokemon. If you insist on interferring with that attempt, then you're likely to seriously cause a bad impression to somebody who's trying to make a honest, if not very important contribution.
As a result, they get fed up and leave, maybe for Bulbapedia, instead of sticking around, and maybe writing on something a bit more important next time. After all, Wikipedia isn't a job, and you can't command people like that there.
The mentality of that some not very important articles are too long is IMO a big problem. Because there has to be something silly and harmless to get a new contributor started. Pokemon is probably one of the best first starting subjects, because it's easy to contribute on it: there's lots of info that can be contributed, and it's well documented outside on WP.
In comparison starting from trying to contribute on the page of Pasteur will be like walking into a battlefield. You'll quickly need to start discussing medical literature, and that's not really easy for most people. Somebody with a real interest might get into that, but most likely only after getting practice on something else, just like coders don't get started by contributing to the Linux kernel.
IMO that's why Wikipedia is losing contributors. If you actively reject attempts to contribute in the easiest places, then smack people in the face with huge amounts of WP: regulation in other places, then very few people are going to be willing to stick around.
So? In more important news, most celebrities (including many that are famous for being stupid, mean, drug addicts etc.) are better paid and better known than most (all?) prominent scientists. Not to mention other worthwhile people.
I "played" this for several months after it first came out. Was reasonably good, not one of the top players but often in the top 30 to 100. Stopped after they added an awful and intolerable music score to it, and gave no way to disable the music. Muting the entire computer wasn't a real option, both because other sound effects made by the "game" were important feedback and because muting would impact other things running on the same computer. Multiple requests to give an option to disable the music (or other alternatives like just removing it) were completely ignored without response. Knowing that if I listened to the "music" any longer I was likely to start killing people, I decided it was prudent to stop running the program. So my question is have they fixed the "music" yet and who decided it was important to force their music choice on all folders rather than just let us run our choice of music players and music on our computers if we wanted music.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's a bit worse than that. The page for Till Tantau, a professor and the creator of TikZ and Blender got deleted because he is not "notable enough".
This is not my sig.
Because
1- the lives of real people, including scientists, are private, whereas that of a fictional character are all open to anybody to summarize, analyze and discuss
2- the achievements of real people are sometimes controversial. Who could say with certainty that Cooley and Tukey invented the FFT, while it was used by Gauss in his astronomy work to speed up his calculation, but thought it unimportant enough to report compared to his number theory work? That itself may be controversial. Science is littered with misappropriated credit. For instance George Dantzig did not invent the first solution the the LP problem. Fourier knew about it ; people in the Soviet Union were using it before WWII. Hence writing about real people, particularly scientists, is hard.
3- There are far far far fewer people interested in the life of non-glamorous people than even minor fictional characters.
4- Who cares? People write about what they want in wikipedia. Someone writing on stargate does not prevent someone else writing on Paul Dirac.
Exactly.... and that's why after modifying and cleaning up hundred upon hundreds of pages, only to see my revisions reversed by a bot no less, is why I stopped contributing years ago to Wikipedia. Now my time is spent playing mindless games on Facebook to pass the time - oh well. The "thou shalt" attitude doesn't help either. Admins need to learn to be subservient and teach rather than dictate.
Oh well, clearly they are doing just fine without me - won't even miss it if they disappeared tommorow. Seriously.
Clearly you missed out on an entire decade of First-Person-Shooter games.
Most likely, there will be a scientific paper containing the results, and as far as I know, scientific research papers are public (or maybe require a fee to read).
Yes, they require a fee to read - in this case, $32 - and yes, scientists are just as unhappy about this as everyone else, but we have no other way to prove our worth to prospective employers, funding agencies, and tenure committees other than prominent publications. However, the actual structure (including experimental data) is deposited in a public database, as required by every major journal in the field, and should be available shortly. (There is usually a little bit of lag time before these depositions are released to the public, but rarely more than a couple of weeks.)
Actually, I forgot to mention that since this research is almost certainly NIH-funded, the article is required to be made public in the near future by depositing the manuscript in PubMed Central. I forget whether the requirement is six months or a year after publication - until then, it remains exclusive to Nature Publishing Group - but eventually it will be freely available.
Wow, "quit your whining". You think they should treat their users any way they please because they are trying to cure Aids. I'm surprised that you didn't throw in a "think of the children" line too
My point isn't about "not offending trovingslosh", but rather about developers who set up feedback systems but can't be bothered to even give a courtesy response when sincere suggestions, even pleas, are made. If I had received even a simple "yea, we will add a choice to disable the "music" when we can get to it, I would have tried to wait it out, or at least checked occasionally to see if they got around to making the fix and I could go back to folding without the torture. I should mention that I did stick it out for over a month, maybe three, with less use and eventually just checking in to see if things were fixed, before I decided that what should have been a very simple UI change wasn't likely to happen. There were many other changes and updates in that time. So you see it as a waste of their time to bother to respond to the feedback system that they created. I see it as a waste of volunteer manpower to ignore the feedback that they solicited, and arrogance on the part of the developers to think that everyone should have to listen to the developer's own choice of "music" when freely giving their time to a scientific application that really had no good reason to insist on playing music in the first place. I doubt very much if I'm the only one that was offended and driven away, both by the sound and by the apathy of the developers for the input of the volunteer users contributing their time.
Thanks, you've helped me make up my mind. I wasn't thrilled about restarting and trying to work up in rank past a quarter million users, but I realize now that it isn't just that, it's having volunteered my time and work for a group that didn't have the common courtesy to respond to very valid feedback. I feel good now about deciding not to go back.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The Jeopardy thing was the only machine which actually looked like AI to me. Chess is just brute force calcuation. Spam is simple pattern matching, Vacuuming is a highschool science project, and Voice recognition is so bad in most cases that it is laughable. Even Watson (I believe the name of the Jeopardy computer) didn't use voice recognition, but rather read the clues using a camera as voice recognition is so flakey, even at the level that Watson was operating at. Although Watson was pretty impressive, it still fails at many things (Toronto is a US city) that it seems that AI is just never going to happen. Well be able to hook up electronic interfaces to actual brains and get them to do the calculations before we ever understand them enough to get that done in silicon.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.