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Harnessing EVE Online For Science (mmorpg.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the waste-time-productively dept.

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.

7 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Science as a Service by Lodlaiden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  2. Great idea. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd love to see more game devs do stuff like this.

    Some sort of opt-in system where you could get some sort of benefit for doing it, even if it is only cosmetic in design.
    Forced on people would likely annoy people enough to maliciously abuse the system, sadly. People can be evil.
    Even Google Image Tagging got abused when large numbers of people started tagging images as nigger.

  3. Why not computer based evaluation ... by perpenso · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why not computer based evaluation ... by perpenso · · Score: 2

      Because they don't have any algorithms that do as good of a job at classifying them as humans do. If you can design one, I'm sure they'll be happy to help you write the paper describing your methodology.

      And humans can do a better job evaluating all the other medical imagery I mentioned above, yet computer vision is increasingly used to augment and screen these human evaluations. And we're talking trained medical personnel in these case. Not gamers who received abbreviated and casual training. The fact that a regular person can be quickly trained in these evaluations suggest that machine interpretation is quite feasible.

      And yes, my area of research in grad school was computer vision and this is the sort of project someone would do for a master's or phd thesis. If you look through the computer vision literature you will find that machine analysis of medical imagery is a very common research project and that techniques are quite advanced.

    2. Re:Why not computer based evaluation ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · · Score: 2

      They're probably doing both? The recent mystery star discovery was a result of human analysis of transient light curves which were missed by the current side-effects.

  4. Now that's optimistic by TFAFalcon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Has the writer ever actually played eve? It's a game about causing other players as much frustration as possible. And now they want to give the players a chance to mess up something even more important than internet spaceships?

    I think this is a more balanced take on the issue.

  5. Reality follows science fiction by Chalex · · Score: 3, Informative

    Neal Stephenson had this as a plot point in his book REAMDE. An MMORPG had a mini-game where you had to recognize some objects, but actually they were being fed TSA machine images from the airports, looking for dangerous objects in luggage.