Gamifying science
Can a game help advance science? In this video, HealthMaker Seth Cooper, a computer scientists explains how his computer game "FoldIt" helps science advance the understanding of protein structures.
Transcript
SETH COOPER: We have this project called Foldit, which is learning about protein structures and basically engaging the players
in kind of research-level structural biochemistry problems to understand the shapes that proteins take.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Up to this point, you know, understanding the protein
structures and the protein shapes has taken place in laboratories with lots of specialized equipment, so there
are some limitations with these kinds of methods because they can be very expensive and time-consuming. When you're trying to find the shape of a particular protein,
there's actually so many shapes that a protein can take. It's just an astronomical number. It's actually not possible to search through all of them
fast enough, even with computers. It's all about the shapes of the proteins, and how they fit together, and how they interact with each other, and how they fold up.
And all the pieces of the protein have to click together in just the right way for it to take the correct shape. We thought that people might be able to help out and contribute
to this, because people have this spatial reasoning ability, you know, puzzle-solving, the ability to think about how the pieces fit together
and see those ways. In, actually, quite a few cases, we've found that the players are able to solve
particular classes of structural problems where there are parts of the protein that are out of place, and the players can find those and actually fix them,
in some cases, better than the computers can, where the computers would actually get stuck. Because the computer can kind of take a shape of a protein
and make it better from that point, just kind of go in the best direction that it can find from that particular point.
What we found is that people are actually able to make the structure a little bit worse before it gets better, because they can see, maybe,
a different solution that the computer wouldn't be able to find. And they're actually able to persist with their idea
and come out ahead of where the computer would have ended up. One of the interesting things about games
is they kind of present people with kind of like a goal and a set of rules, and then, it's up to the players
to try to figure out a way to reach the goal, given the rules that you've given them. And people can come up with all kinds
of creative and interesting ways you never would have expected when you set up the rules and you set up the goal.
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