foldit

A fascinating story in the Telegraph today

Scientists had been struggling to map the structure of M-PMV, a protein involved in a virus that causes a form of simian Aids, in an experiment called CASP9. The search, in that experiment and others, had been going on for more than a decade. The solution was not found by a laboratory but the players of an online puzzle game.

Where 'education' and 'knowledge' failed to find a solution 'creative thinking' and 'understanding the rules' triumphed. Or something like that. The thing I find most fascinating about the story is that the gamers

were initially hampered by the computer modelling that had already taken place. Trapped within the automatic analysis’s best guess, they were unable to make the radical moves that eventually led to the correct answer

found a solution without knowing anything about the problem apart from a set of rules that you have to work to.

You can find out more by heading over to Foldit. I'm having a play around with it and it's quite addictive in the early stages. Who knows? Maybe we work together to cure the virus that causes people to become lying, self important, self obsessed, duplicitous twats the moment they get elected to political office?*




*Very few are immune to this infection