Using Gamers to Solve World Problems

Hi ya! How's it going, eh?  My question for the day is..do you like playing computer games? The trend is unstoppable. Well fill your mug and grab onto a virtual treat while I tell you how a young scientist puts the growing power of these gamers to good use. (If memory serves, I did a post on this a year or so ago but the concept is amazing!)

Adrien Treuille has always been interested in crowds...how they move...patterns of crown behaviour and he uses the power of crowds of people, particularly gamers, to solve scientific problems. This young professor creates simulations of physical processes ranging from the flow of people in a crowd to the motion of proteins in a cell. And while his models are stunningly realistic, what's truly amazing is that they run not on supercomputers but on ordinary PCs. "I want to place curling smoke in the palm of your hand," he says.

To make this possible, Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science, streamlines the mathematical representation of a scenario, removing unlikely outcomes. For example, he says, a full simulation of how a shirt might be folded would include fantastic origami-style shapes. In most cases, a simulation would need to cover only ordinary creases.

Treuille's simulations have attracted commercial interest. For example, ESPN used his techniques to simulate the airflow around NASCAR vehicles on live TV. And Electronic Arts has licensed his crowd-simulation techniques for its games, where they're replacing more processing-intensive artificial-intelligence methods.

But Treuille's work has applications beyond entertainment. He and colleague Seth Cooper designed a downloadable game called Foldit that allows players to fold and tug on simulations of known proteins to design new molecules. More than 90,000 users have registered and played since the game's launch in May 2008. Treuille wonders if someone--perhaps even an amateur--might someday use Foldit to discover a protein that cures cancer.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University are attempting to harness the wisdom of crowds with the creation of an online video game that challenges players to design new ways to fold RNA molecules.

The scientists hope to uncover fundamental principles underlying one of life’s building blocks, and they believe that the free game will also serve as a training ground for a cadre of citizen-experts who will help generate a new storehouse of biological knowledge. The process may also aid researchers in building more powerful automated algorithms for biological discovery.

The game, EteRNA, is accessible at eterna.cmu.edu/content/EteRNA. It allows non-biologists to design complex new ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, as well as to receive quick feedback on the biological function of their designs.

In a way, EteRNA is a successor to Foldit, a popular Internet-based video game that proved that the pattern matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists.

Dr. Treuille says he harnesses the power of thousands of gamers and uses their energy level and inter-communications (through chat) to solve real life problems.

Now there is one imaginative guy!

See ya, eh!

Bob