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By Root 323 0

Foldit. It sounded like the dull educational computer games I saw in school when I was growing up in the 1980s. But I downloaded the game, and spent hours playing it over several days. At that point, the excuse “I’m doing research for my book” was rapidly becoming a euphemism for “this is a great way to procrastinate on writing my book,” and I forced myself to stop. So far, more than 75,000 people have signed up. People play the game because it’s good. It has the compelling, addictive quality all good computer games have: a task that’s challenging but not impossible, instant feedback on how well you’re doing, and the sense that you’re always just one step away from improvement. It’s the same addictive quality we saw earlier in the MathWorks competition, and which is also felt by many participants in Galaxy Zoo. Furthermore, like Galaxy Zoo, Foldit is deeply meaningful to many of the players. Einstein once explained why he was more interested in science than politics by saying, “Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.” Each time you classify a galaxy or find a better way to fold a protein, you’re making a small but real contribution to human knowledge. For many participants, Foldit and Galaxy Zoo aren’t guilty pleasures, like playing World of Warcraft or other online games. Instead, they’re a way of contributing something important to society. One of the top Foldit players, Aotearoa, describes it as “the most challenging, exciting, stimulating, intense, addictive game I have ever played,” and comments that it provides a way for people to “offer something proactive to solving some of the worlds/societies most complicated puzzles, rather than waste time playing a ‘game’ that does not provide the same ‘rewards’ as folding protein does, this way!”

In addition to the individual motivation to play, Foldit also encourages collective problem solving by the players. There is an online discussion forum and a wiki, where players share news and discuss their strategies for protein folding. The game incorporates a simple programming language that players can use to create scripts—short programs—that automate game tasks. A typical script might implement a strategy for improving a fold, or identify which part of the protein’s current shape is in most need of improvement. Hundreds of such scripts have been publicly shared—an open source approach to protein folding. Many of the players work in groups, sharing their insights about the best ways of folding. All this work is greatly informed by the game score, which, as in the MathWorks competition, focuses participants’ attention where it will be most useful: when one of the high-scoring players shares a strategy tip or a script, other players pay attention. The players themselves are wildly varied, ranging from a self-described “educated redneck” from Dallas, Texas, to a theater historian from South Dakota, to a grandmother of three with a high-school education.

Just how good are the Foldit players at folding proteins? Every two years since 1994, there’s been a worldwide competition of biochemists using computers to predict protein structures. The competition, called CASP—Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction—is very important to the scientists who work on protein structure prediction. Before the competition starts, the CASP organizers approach some of the facilities that determine protein structure using the traditional approach of X-ray diffraction, and ask them what protein structures they expect to complete in the next couple of months. They then use those proteins as puzzles in CASP. Starting with the sequence of amino acids making up the protein, the CASP competitors are asked to predict the structure. At the end of the competition, teams are ranked on how close they come to the actual structure.

Foldit players competed in both the CASP 2008 and 2010 competitions. They performed extremely well, finishing near or at the top on many of the CASP challenges. Foldit developer Zoran