Online games play a big technological achievement

This "Big game". Protein folding game Foldit players helped scientists at the University of Washington crack down on an AIDS-related enzyme structure, published in the recent issue of the journal Nature.　　The author of the thesis has the name of the two player group in the game. Many people think that online games are for entertainment, if indulge in it will lead to internet addiction syndrome, and even cause a lot of social problems.　　So, the story of Foldit players tells us that online games can also have other play. Foldit The idea is a joint proposal by Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington and computer Professor David Selisin. Professor Baker had a protein structure called rosetta@home. A distributed computing project that divides huge engineering data into small chunks that are executed by multiple computers. "But they thought," said Seiss Coux Cooper, a computer professor at the School of Foldit, in an interview with The Economist, "Human beings have unique problem-solving and spatial reasoning capabilities, and they may be better able to detect protein structures than computers." "Foldit Player's task is, after the game given a target protein, in accordance with the scientific laws of the premise, with amino acids such as building blocks like the target protein" build "out. It is reported that the cracked protein m-pmv into the game soon after, there are players to find out the possible amino acid assembly methods, the researchers confirmed the results are correct. Over the past more than 10 years, the structure of M-PMV has been a puzzling mystery of the scientific community.　　The Foldit research team said in a blog that two more tasks are underway. Foldit, which was launched in May 2008, is thought to be a "revolutionary" outcome of online gaming in the field of scientific research. Last year, the project was funded by the Pentagon's 14 million-dollar support branch of the Technology Research Division.　　The University of Washington has set up the game Science Center to work on technology that uses gamers to solve scientific problems. Online games can not only serve the scientific research, but also help to solve public policy. In August this year, the British Meteorological Office and the University of Bristol and Cambridge University researchers collaborated to launch an online weather game. The game takes 5 minutes to complete, the player assumes he is an ice cream merchant, according to the real-time weather decide when to sell. The game will be played for one months, the British Meteorological Office said on its website that the data from the "largest and most comprehensive study" in history could help improve the way the reliability of weather forecasts is communicated to the public. The British Meteorological Bureau said on its website September 9 that 8000 people had been involved in the weather game by then.　　Last August, the number of Foldit users reached 57000, and one of the developers, Professor Cooper, said his team was considering using improved games such as 3D technology to make them more fun and closer to reality. Facts have proved that more attempts to contact network technology interdisciplinary Research, "net" People's wisdom, can greatly promote scientific and technological progress, will continue to the Internet era of humanThe development of society injects new connotations. (Grotto) to share: