Given these past instances, imagine my surprise when I saw an article painting gamers in a good light coming from none other than Fox News.
The story in question talks about researchers at the University of Washington who recently used a protein puzzle program called Foldit to make a scientific breakthrough in the structure of a retroviral protein. The researchers, who are going to be published in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, state that three dimensional models built by players of the retroviral protein have revealed information that could lead to the development of new drugs to target specific sites in order to inhibit it. They predict that these drugs could inhibit HIV and thereby also prevent AIDS. The breakthrough comes after years of struggling with automated protein folding systems.
Seth Cooper, a co-creator of the program, helped build it a few years ago at the university. He states in the article that humans have spatial reasoning skills that computers do not.
The researchers too express hope that gamers could be mobilized like this in the future in order to provide further scientific insight in this and other areas. Firas Khatib, a lead author of the study, speaks of the abilities of gamers and how they succeed where automated computations could not.
It’s nice to see that gaming is getting some positive press from our friends in the scientific community, and to know that all those hours playing Tetris or other puzzle games could come in handy with respect to the future of humanity. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into some Ender’s Game scenario. Because no one wants to hear Fox’s take on that.
If you would like to play Foldit you can create a user account (required to play) and download the game for free here. It’s slow at moment due to all the new server traffic, but give it some time and it will connect. So go on… solve some puzzles… for science… you monsters!
Source: Fox News
