Foldit

The tag line for Foldit is “Solve Puzzles for Science.” It’s a protein folding game and the results of the game being played by people around the internet will be used for scientific research. The idea is that a large number of people playing a game can perform some tasks better than computers. Does that really work? From what I can tell, that is the question. The focus of the research right now seems to be proving that this works.

So, how is the game? When you play, you get dropped into protein folding without much introduction. It’s not entirely clear, to start, what the goal is or what your tactics should be. As you play and experiment, the goals become more clear: avoid collisions, create hydrogen bonds, eliminate voids. I also was able to develop a little bit of strategy but the only tools that I seemed to have available were pulling on the protein chain and wiggling the backbone. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing, but I managed to get progressively better scores.

In all, it’s worth a look. And if anyone can explain the game to me a little more, that would be great.