Gamers Solve Real World Retrovirus Enzyme Secret

8:00 AM - September 21, 2011 - By Douglas Perry - Source : UW

Video gamers may have opened the door a new AIDS drug. Researchers at the University of Washington challenged gamers to play Foldit and come up with the structure of a retrovirus enzyme - a task scientists could not solve over more than a decade.

The gamers did it did it in three weeks.

"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," said Firas Khatib of the University of Washington Department of Biochemistry. The enzyme in Foldit has a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and proliferates, the research group said. There have been efforts to develop AIDS-fighting drugs that block these enzymes, but it was unknown so far what the retroviral enzyme looks like.

Foldit was created by computer scientists at the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with the Khatib's lab. "The focus of the UW Center for Game Sciences is to solve hard problems in science and education that currently cannot be solved by either people or computers alone," said director Zoran Popovic, associate professor of computer science and engineering.

The solution of the virus enzyme structure, "indicates the power of online computer games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems."

According to Popovic, the game required gamers to learn real-world modeling problems and ended up engaging the public in scientific discovery. "The ingenuity of game players," Khatib said, "is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."

Popovic noted that Foldit provides evidence that games can "turn novices into domain experts" and the same approach is currently used "to change the way math and science are taught in school."

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nebun 09/21/2011 2:15 PM

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wait....we got it all wrong....where are the lawyers???

kikireeki 09/21/2011 2:34 PM

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Now who was saying that PC is dying?

drwho1 09/21/2011 2:35 PM

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how much did this gamers got paid for their 3 weeks of hard work?

lostmyclan 09/21/2011 2:44 PM

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maybe the pay is a cure for aids... our others....

what u gonna do if u get aids and no cure ?

supertrek32 09/21/2011 2:47 PM

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Gamers:
Fighting AIDS, zombies, and AIDS zombies.

Anonymous 09/21/2011 2:53 PM

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wow old news travels fast!!!

bunz_of_steel 09/21/2011 2:57 PM

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Lets see this make headline news!

Oh yeh.. no big hot shot celeb or politician to glamorize and exploit for $$

TSM

iamboristhespider 09/21/2011 3:19 PM

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This is the best news story I've heard in a very long time. Foldit and Folding@home are some of the most ingenious research methods I've seen

Anonymous 09/21/2011 3:24 PM

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Proof once again that one person can accomplish some greatness (for the most part), but many people, working together, with the right motivation can truly move mountains!

Great work!

blubbey 09/21/2011 3:54 PM

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tom_@ :
Proof once again that one person can accomplish some greatness (for the most part), but many people, working together, with the right motivation can truly move mountains!Great work!

Damn right. Not much a couple million people working on something can't solve.

COLGeek 09/21/2011 5:02 PM

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bunz_of_steel :
Lets see this make headline news! Oh yeh.. no big hot shot celeb or politician to glamorize and exploit for $$TSM

It already did a couple fo days ago....

COLGeek 09/21/2011 5:03 PM

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Distributed computer and a few smart guys (the gamers in the story) can do some amazing things. This is cool stuff. Think of the possibilities to harness this power to solve other problems.....

Goldengoose 09/21/2011 5:35 PM

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COLGeek :
Distributed computer and a few smart guys (the gamers in the story) can do some amazing things. This is cool stuff. Think of the possibilities to harness this power to solve other problems.....

Like why people keep buying apple products...

watcha 09/21/2011 5:42 PM

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Anonymous 09/21/2011 5:43 PM

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this is the correct way to crowd source, folding@home was just a brute force method trying to crunchy every possible combination, this uses the cognitive capabilities of users to solve the problem, participation was probably significantly smaller than a folding@home cluster because it required active participation but achieved results much faster than expected (that was some dedication considering this would be closer to your Tetris than CoD affair)

Kelavarus 09/21/2011 6:11 PM

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What, no one's going to point out that this is exactly what Stargate Universe proposed?

dread_cthulhu 09/21/2011 7:05 PM

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Very Nice!

CaedenV 09/21/2011 8:43 PM

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watcha :
Like why people keep crying about people buying the most popular products...

When you break it down by market share mac products are hardly the most popular with the exception of the iPod/iPhone, and the iPhone has been getting crowded out lately.

Kelavarus :
What, no one's going to point out that this is exactly what Stargate Universe proposed?

Woot!

Zagen30 09/21/2011 9:28 PM

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RealCrowdSource :
this is the correct way to crowd source, folding@home was just a brute force method trying to crunchy every possible combination, this uses the cognitive capabilities of users to solve the problem, participation was probably significantly smaller than a folding@home cluster because it required active participation but achieved results much faster than expected (that was some dedication considering this would be closer to your Tetris than CoD affair)

F@h still is going strong. And Foldit (and by extension Rosetta@home, of which Foldit is an offshoot) and F@h target different things. Foldit is trying to find a correct structure. F@h finds out how correct structures get to that configuration and why they might end up as a different structure.

NightLight 09/21/2011 10:03 PM

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so , gamers actually contribute to preventing aids twice. once because they usually don't have girfriends, and twice because of this

ChromeTusk 09/21/2011 10:57 PM

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Great story and a boost to gamers and the PC industry. My only complaint is the story broke out earlier this week (or even before the weekend, I do not remember).

I think this is the original article, but requires a subscription to view:
http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal [...] .2119.html

getreal 09/22/2011 12:25 PM

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agnickolov 09/22/2011 1:01 AM

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bunz_of_steel :
Lets see this make headline news! Oh yeh.. no big hot shot celeb or politician to glamorize and exploit for $$TSM

Guess what: it did! Last week I read about it from the headline news on Yahoo.

wiyosaya 09/22/2011 4:58 AM

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I wonder if they got the idea from watching Stargate Universe??

supere989 09/22/2011 6:26 AM

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-1

GoldenGoose :
Like why people keep buying apple products...

ROFLMAO!!!!ROFLMAO!!!!ROFLMAO!!!!ROFLMAO!!!!ROFLMAO!!!!

palladin9479 09/22/2011 7:49 AM

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wiyosaya :
I wonder if they got the idea from watching Stargate Universe??

That is exactly what I thought when I read it. Eli FTW!

eddieroolz 09/22/2011 11:03 AM

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I read about this news on 2ch about 3-4 days ago, but it still amazes me that we have this potential in ourselves.

WyomingKnott 09/22/2011 2:46 PM

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F@H may be using a brute-force approach, but bear in mind that quite a few computational problems, even before computers, were first attacked with a brute-force approach. Then people who were clever (or too lazy to do the brute-force work) came up with a better way. The better way frequently came about simply because many people were exposed to the old way. So, perhaps the ubiquity and small success of F@H led to this next approach, which would not have happened otherwise.

One obvious historical example: Young Gauss' teacher assigned the class the task of adding all the numbers from 1 to 100 to keep them busy. Gauss came up with the now well-known formula for summing this series.

(Note that I'm not particularly defending Folding at Home. I'm trying to point out the value of starting with a brute-force approach and getting a lot of minds involved.)