Fold-it gamers solve scientific problem

[petrusbroder]

Gaming is fun and it is also scientifically efficient - more efficient than computer generated models.
Several gamers (together with the scientists, of course) solved a protein folding problem, which has eluded science for quite some time. They used the computer game-like program "Fold.It".

The Fold.it announcement
Here is the popular article presenting that gamers solved a protein folding problem.
Here is the scientific paper it self.

IMHO this is really great! 🙂

 

[Scouzer]

Pretty much the first good thing I've ever heard come from DC (other than high power bills) and it's not even standard DC.

Great news anyway.

 

[dmcowen674]

So was this more of a Modeling program than Distributed Agent?

 

[petrusbroder]

Yes. But it was done by many ... thus distributed modelling?

 

[Sunny129]

very interesting...i see they had to combine human ingenuity with raw compute power to achieve this. of course that much isn't such a surprise to me. does anyone remember when MIT's computer Watson competed on Jeopardy!? although Watson ended up winning the tournament, i do recall that, of all the answers (or more appropriately, the questions) it got wrong, it was WAY off the mark. and i believe the explanation for that was that, as capable as Watson is as a computer, it still had piss poor spatial reasoning skills.

Pretty much the first good thing I've ever heard come from DC (other than high power bills) and it's not even standard DC.

Great news anyway.

then i guess you haven't payed 😛 much attention to the DC world lately...the Einstein@Home project has discovered 10 new radio pulsars in just the last few months, and the Milkyway@Home project has made great strides in modeling and simulating the dynamics of our Milkyway Galaxy and its closest neighbors over the past year...

...though i suppose what you say might generally be true about those DC projects that are geared toward biology and other life sciences, barring this recent Fold.it achievement...

 

[petrusbroder]

... to continue on Sunny129 post:
World Community Grid has quite a few findings published (I mean findings as results not just how DC works), PrimeGrid has found a lot of primes which other wise would not have been found so fast, AQUA@home (a project which now has ended successfully) the DC community has helped a lot to crunch the numbers needed to build the first quantum computer, MalariaContol.net has to some extent clarified the epidemiology of malaria ...

 

[Rudy Toody]

... to continue on Petrusbroder post:
SIMAP continues to be a valuable resource for scientists because of our monthly data-base updates.