20 September, 2011
By Greg Morgan
In an amazing story, a team of gamers has managed to crack a problem in AIDS research that had been puzzling scientists for years. A group of “Foldit” players has taken just three weeks to create a model of the M-PMV retrovirus through the use of 3D pattern matching and prediction.
Lots of scientists are puzzled about why “Foldit” players managed to solve such a complex problem in such a short amount of time. “I think there are two things going on here,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT in an interview with Technewsworld.
“One, ‘Foldit’ is a game that attracts the competitive sort of gamer who likes puzzles, and this seems to be the type of puzzle where intuition and the natural ingrained ability of the human mind to solve three-dimensional problems exceeds the ability of computers to do so,” said King, adding “The other is that, in many cases, scientific researchers tend to go into projects with certain preconceptions because of their training and education while gamers don’t.”
In order to solve the problem, Foldit players used the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), which is one of the tools and algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology. The Rosetta@home project is a distributed computing project involved in predicting solutions about protein structures that are already close to being solved.
The Foldit players managed to pick up the correct solution, something which the scientists were unable to do alone. This is not the first time that Foldit players have helped out with research either, with teams of players competing to fold a protein found in pancreatic cancer during the 2010 University Protein Folding Challenge.
It seems that the natural 3D pattern-matching abilities of the human brain are far superior to purely algorithmic solutions, and that gamers working without the preconceptions of learned scientists are sometimes more able to think outside the box.
