Using a complex gaming system developed by website creators http://www.fold.it, computer gamers are helping solve a puzzle of how proteins are structured that is helping scientific researchers sold problems that simpler study methods had kept that process slow and time-consuming.
Gamers were able to create the model in just 3 weeks and left scientist amazed at their speed and accuracy.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release. “The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.
The game creator Seth Cooper states that humans have spatial reasoning skills that computers cannot accurately recreate, and that games bring skill-sets of both humans and computers together in a way that provides results that were not possible before.
Read more about this breakthrough study here:
http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2119.html
