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Crowdsourcing

Twist it here and there

It was just recently reported that gamers have helped to solve the problem of the structure of certain retrovirus proteins; it was done through 'Foldit', a game designed to aid scientists to tap on the human brain's abilities in spatial reasoning. Typically, the sequence of proteins are known but the design (ie their structure) is known only to a certain level because microscopes only provides a 2 dimensional view of it. Knowing the properties of the different molecular groups on the sequence can allow scientists to work out the interactions between the different parts of the proteins and so the 'game' simulates that and participants of the game tries different configurations of folding the protein that helps optimize space and the shape.

It's a brilliant example of crowd-sourcing, where the intelligence of the crowd is gathered, aggregated to be used to advance our frontiers of knowledge. Both Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki and Wikinomics by Don Tapscot and Anthony Williams discussed such use of crowd wisdom as well as the creation of 'knowledge marketplaces'. It is important how they help to refine the division of labour even further, by allowing people to use their abilities without necessarily knowing how their work would contribute to the greater picture of things. In the case of Foldit, people are just making use of simple rules of thumb and pursuing simple goals in the game that would ultimately help them discover little pieces of the big puzzle. The scientists, then, would take these pieces and try to put them in place...