Today's Awesome

Hat-tip to Homasse:

Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures

Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community.

Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.

As I commented there: working in natural language processing, one of the big tasks is manually analyzing the outputs in order to figure out where the maths went wrong and how to add human-intelligence. Some folks have recently started using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for this kind of thing, but I think the game setting is a lot more enticing than paying folks a penny per task. Especially once you throw in the MMO features like player ranks and special challenges.