Gamers See The World Differently
Remember that time when video game players saved the world? No? Well… just wait. It can’t be too far off from now. In the mean time you’ll have to settle for a group of gamers accomplishing in three weeks what scientiests have been attempting to do for almost a decade now — mapping the enzyme responsible for HIV amoung other retroviruses.
Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools.
To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.
Cracking the enzyme “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs,” says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release.
“The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
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“Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.”
Aside from the fantastic and historic medical accomplishment this signifies, it also supports a theroy that I’ve always had rolling around in the back of my head: Gamers see the world differently — we’re usually wired a bit differently in the head. This give us the ability to see things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
