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."

Comments

Excellent use of crowd-sourcing

[msobkow]

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. :)

Re:Crappy analogy

[nadaou]

After all, in this situation all the gamers did was offer up CPU time towards solving the protein folding problem for this specific enzyme. They didn't even look at anything, really.

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.

Re:Avoid SGC

[vadim_t]

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.