Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years

[kia]

Please stop posting articles with link bait titles. Even the abstract of the original article has more information [1].

[1] http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2...

[gort]

This seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf

[cooperadymas]

This has always reminded me of the pilot episode of Stargate Universe, where Eli Wallace solves a real world complex math problem in a video game. Maybe Fold.It was thought up first, but it's a fascinating concept either way. It makes a person wonder what else could be accomplished via clever crowd sourcing.

Also see Google's reCAPTCHA project: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

[Cymen]

That meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter

[kaybe]

Ah. So these people are responsible for japanese, greek and formulas in my capchas.. they should really have a "I can't type this" button for more efficiency.

[JosephHatfield]

My impression is that even though the article refers to gamers, these players are unlike most gamers in that they may have extensive knowledge of organic chemistry. The article may be over-simplifying the amount of expertise required to come up with the solution.

[danso]

It's frustrating how this blogspam post, and the news articles it references, won't just simply link to the actual game's homepage: http://fold.it/portal/

[antirez]

all the pages in that site are identical to the home page. I guess there is some kind of problem going on.

[tokenadult]

Previous HN discussion about a different report of this same finding:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044

[simon_weber]

For anyone interested in games incentivizing people to engage in research like this, I just saw a talk this morning that mentioned PhotoCity: www.photocitygame.com. It's a game to encourage picture taking of landmarks; the researchers then collate these into a 3d model.

[viraptor]

There's also Eterna http://eterna.cmu.edu/ - I think it was on HN some time ago. (also biology-related)

[soheildb]

this is a perfect exame of human computation

[sliverstorm]

It is less "computation" and more "pattern matching/processing", something computers are really bad at, but people are relatively good at.

[Macsenour]

Gameification - just another example.

[vlad99]

Maybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.