There is seemingly no end to the amount of effort that people will exert on video games. Whether the digital environment rewards players with points, coins, or simply bragging rights, gamers will devote significant energy to achieving tasks—even mindless tasks—when presented in video game form. Recently, computer scientists and biochemists harnessed this collective energy and applied it to a scientific goal. The goal of the game called FoldIt: predict the structure of a protein.
Proteins are polymers (long chains) of amino acids that fold themselves into staggeringly complex ways. The way that a protein folds itself is determined by various physical and chemical properties. Each property is predictable by itself, but when you combine thousands of interacting properties in a single protein, the final structure becomes exponentially harder to predict. However, knowing the precise structure of a protein allows researchers to design molecules that selectively target that protein. Thus a drug can increase or decrease the protein’s biological activity without affecting other proteins and causing side effects.
In the August 5, 2010 installment of the journal Nature, researchers created a game that challenges users in an online environment to try to determine the structure of protein. Users from all over the world could log on to the game and compete or collaborate to make the best protein structure. The rules of the game closely follow the chemical and physical properties that determine protein folding in the first place. While gamers did not need to know about the sulfur crosslinks formed by cysteine, it was made clear to players which orientations were more favorable than others.
It turns out that players of FoldIt performed at least as well as already existing macromolecular prediction software. Human players were able to create potential conformations and orientations in ways that software could not, since software only follows a set of predefined rules. Human gamers bring creativity and strategy to the process and, when opened to a global online audience, effectively become human supercomputer.
