Atomic Nerds

Gamers Crack Protein Folding Problem. The proper journal article is here.

More accurately, this would be titled “clever biochemists induce a population of people who do spatial reasoning puzzles for fun to solve their spatial reasoning problem for entertainment and bragging rights”.

The journal article is worth digging into; if you can read around the biochemistry jargon it’s a pretty interesting description of the approach the group took and in what ways the Foldit players- non-professionals all- were not as good at the top-performing computer models, and in what ways they were better. More interesting yet is the way the researchers directing the whole thing analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of their players- and what they were succeeding and failing at and why- and re-tweaked their presentations of the problems in order to bring out the biggest strengths of their players. As an end result, they wound up solving a problem in three weeks that had been outstanding for ten years.

Even in the paper the researchers credit “human intuition” and “the ingenuity of gamers”, but what I see here is people being given a toy to play with that builds very specific cognitive skills and then being directed- quite skillfully- to sharpen those skills on successive levels of difficulty. All for the pleasures of teamwork, competition, and the sense of accomplishment.

Reminds me of nothing so much as the Calutron Girls, a pool of young women in Oak Ridge, Tennessee hired to operate the electromagnetic uranium separation machines at Y-12 during the Manhattan Project. They explicitly were never told what it was they were doing or why- for national security reasons- but they were able to outperform the PhDs who understood all of it, because their entire skill set was in the process and they practiced constantly.

You learn what you do, no matter why you’re doing it.

Posted Science: we'll fuck you up, the Mario generation |