Slashdot Mirror
Harnessing EVE Online For Science (mmorpg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists and the developers of space MMORPG EVE Online are working on a project to harness the power of the game's huge playerbase to do useful scientific work. The Human Protein Atlas has 13 million images to map, and there's no way a small team of scientists can manage that task alone. CCP Games, the makers of EVE, will try to encourage contribution by creating a mini-game within EVE to train players and get them to do some cataloging. To start, "Project Discovery will feed about a 250,000 images of microscopic cells and tissue that players will then study to identify basic shapes and structures, categorizing the images in a way that will help scientists deduce a given protein's purpose." The developers are confident that the EVE community, which has already come together to support various charity endeavors, will rally behind this noble cause as well. To get players to participate, the devs reward players with loyalty points that have some sort of positive effect within EVE.
If they had an API to request an image and return the results, I'm sure quite a few mobile games would get behind building that in. Way better than click hammering for no purpose.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Might make more sense to apply computer vision to the problem, have a software based evaluation of the image and then flag promising images to be viewed by actual medical personnel. This is an approach already widely in use today. Scanning sonogram, x-ray, mri, etc imagery for "anomalies" and highlighting those for medical personnel.