Gamers, get your folding on

May 9, 2008

Technology Review was the first place I saw it, then someone put it up on Friendfeed and now Andrew Perry has a great post on Foldit. Foldit comes out of the lab of a bbgm favorite, David Baker, right here at the University of Washington.

Foldit combines gaming with protein structure prediction. It’s an interesting approach to spreading scientific problems. Folding@home built upon the success of Seti@home and the geek cred of running on gaming consoles and has built quite a following. Will Foldit, which presents a simple, fun interface to get people interested in protein structure (and the existence of Folding@home makes this somewhat familiar to geeks everywhere) be an example of how we can leverage crowdsourcing? Andrew makes some interesting points (which I agree with) on weighting crowdsourcing, although that’s always a hard thing to do, but I’d like to see karma, etc come into play here.

It’s good to see protein structure getting some attention and continuing to be creative. It’s always been my favorite scientific subject. The field lends itself to “pretty pictures”, so getting non-experts involved is a possibility.

The site and server have had connectivity issues since I’ve been trying, so perhaps they need help with web resources, cause lots seem to be interested.

Here is a list of people supporting the project: UW Animation Research Labs, UW Baker Lab, DARPA, Microsoft, and Adobe. Nice list.

Image via Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: David Baker, Foldit, Protein Folding, Protein Structure Prediction, Gaming, Crowdsourcing