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Foldit?
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➔ Foldit website
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90 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Try to emphasize spatial skills. Spatial skills are not usually emphasized or tested, but are extremely important for many areas of knowledge.
Being able to manipulate objects on multiple axis in your head turns a lot of arbitrarily hard tasks into arbitrarily easy ones. Case in point, protein folding.
Factorio is decent at this, but really, a full 3D building game would be better. I'd recommend either Infinifactory or Minecraft for this task, as adding a third dimensional axis is multiple orders more complex than anything Factorio can currently crank out.
Random thought: if cancer researchers had made a porn game instead of a boring protein-folding game we'd have cured that shit by now. I mean, keep the protein folding - you need that - but reward the player with jiggly anime boobs or something.
I think what it means is that those are his alt accounts.
In this post BootsMcGraw says that Trigger and HeadlessChickenVillain approve of the post.
Looking at the user profile of HeadlessChickenVillain we see that it is an alt account just used for IRC.
I'd imagine that Trigger is also an alt, used for moderating chat. There is no user profile for Trigger.
Headless Chicken Villain. So random. Almost as random as the penguin of doom.
You might consider this educational (perhaps it is), but there is a protein folding puzzle game that has made use of user solutions to better understand protein folding. I believe they published a/some papers that credited the players as well.
> But will controlling a computer require programming knowledge?
That depends on what one means by "programming knowledge". Is this an example: Foldit: Solve Puzzles for Science
Foldit isn't obviously computer programming, but it certainly beats crafting neural network architectures "by hand" (what Foldit replaces).
Or consider the relationship between modern print literacy and whether one has been trained in Palmer Method handwriting. If we can't write legibly on paper, are we literate, or not?
My point is the meaning of these terms is changing rapidly, and the required skills are too.
> We can bet that computer science is more important than the subjects it replaces.
Computer science doesn't replace any other subjects, but it may need them as prerequisites.
FoldIt is an online puzzle game that helps scientists understand proteins to help cure some diseases- theres already been a few breakthroughs with it iirc. As a puzzle game, it's pretty so-so, but the premise is fantastic.
Fold-it is an interesting one. It's essentially turned the problem of predicting protein structure into a puzzle game. It made some news several years ago when it was successfully used to inform new discoveries about certain HIV proteins. I haven't kept up with it recently, but it looks like it's still going and still has puzzles available.
Nice... reminds me of the scene in Toys. With modern gamification of "grinding" tasks, I could see kids doing protein folding and other similar tasks for ranks and badges, not really knowing the value of the work they're doing.
I have played Foldit, love the game. It is my impression that the gamers do everything. You use your pointer device to fold the protein structure on the screen, add hydrogen bonds, shield a hydrophobic amino acid by folding it into the interior of the structure, etc., all while trying not to destabilize the protein structure. This is all done by hand using strategies based on understanding the workings of the folding processes that are simulated on the screen. The program does have some automatic functions to bring you further in a shorter period of time, but you have to first hand fold the structure into the ballpark of correct before for those functions are of any real use.
Edit: Link https://fold.it/portal/info/about
I'd like to chime in. There is this great program we learned about in my molecular biology class. It is very collaborative and has solved protein structure questions before. You can use it independently or collaboratively. It's really fun just to fool around on, since it's like a puzzle.
However, I'm uncertain whether it can create non-protein molecular structures.
I'm not sure which ones most people would have heard of, but Zooniverse has a whole bunch of different projects that make use of humans' skill at visually identifying different patterns and types of objects.
I think Foldit is pretty well known, but it's a cool project which seeks to better understand the structure of proteins.
Fold.it if you meant 'useful' in a real world sense.
If you mean more in a 'I am a badass and I influence things' sense, World of Warcraft with Draenor has you commanding an outpost and basically being General Shit of the Important Army.
If you haven't dabbled with fold.it it's worth playing through the tutorials and trying a couple of the current challenges. It's a very 3D topic, so starting your learning in a 3D medium has some benefit.
Fold.it might not fully qualify as "properly studying", but when you're digging into the heavy material, it's good to have a better mental model of what a textbook passage is describing.
You might be interested in Fold It which helps scientist solve protein folding problems.
>an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective of Foldit is to fold the structures of selected proteins as perfectly as possible, using tools provided in the game.
>The highest scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether or not there is a native structural configuration (native state) that can be applied to relevant proteins in the real world. Scientists can then use these solutions to target and eradicate diseases and create biological innovations. A 2010 paper in the science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.
Suggestion: A section for volunteering for crowdsourcing projects online for people who need to be proactive.
FoldIt: Use your computing power to find antivirals
Zooniverse: Featured Project: Bash the Bug
FoldIt is in the news most for crowdsourcing projects trying to deal with coronaviruses, but the other projects all advance science in a meaningful way and would like people to find a project they like most. Zooniverse has tons of projects, although most seem to be camera trap project to determine population densities of animals. What can I say, their platform seems to be a good fit for those types of projects.
This is kind of a shameless plug, but I used to play FoldIt (https://fold.it/portal/) as an undergrad. It was a puzzle game based on trying to get a protein to its closest native folded state. The "puzzles" themselves were based on real-world problems in protein chemistry. I found out recently that playing this game helped me get listed as a contributor in a nature scientific reports paper (listed as "Foldit Players consortium"): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26812-8
In other news, my second first-author publication just got accepted with minor revisions!
I also finished writing a literature review this week for my masters program! Gonna find out about the feasibility of publishing that once I talk about it with my boss.
There's a couple versions that find new prime numbers, but yeah it doesn't benefit society much, however if you do want to use your computer to benefit society you can run (Foldit)[https://fold.it/] and help discover how virus proteins are folded.
Chemistry, basically. Some amino acids like to hydrogen bond to other amino acids. Others cluster due to shared affinity or hatred for water. There are also "chaperone" proteins which help bend the target protein into the right shape. Misfolding prions are acting as chaperones to misfold other prions.
Play this game if you really really want to know how this works.
Yes. Yes yes yes. The flagship of this is a program called Rosetta. There is a "video game" version of it called rosetta@home http://boinc.bakerlab.org/
I'm doing my PhD in this field and yes! This is a huge thing!
Edit: I meant to link fold ot at home. This is the video game version for everyone! https://fold.it/portal/
That's what I get for redditing before I wake up
It is probably more appropriate for slugs to participate in FoldIt, rather than Folding@home, as FoldIt was in part developed by Firas Khatib, who got his PhD from UCSC. (Also, I think that FoldIt is technically superior for protein prediction.)
Your weekly PSA on COVID:
What to do:
Check with your local, county, state health officials on updates to your situation; they are most likely on social network (like Twitter) to provide up to date information. Check with your local news on things pertinent to your area. Sites like https://www.who.int/, https://www.cdc.gov/, and your local state .gov website provide up to date factual information.
Check with your place of work/studies/etc on telework/remote work/work from home. They may offer it depending on the type of work. Check with some of your services/utilities to see what they are offering to help you/anyone to help overcome this pandemic.
How you can help fight the spread:
Practice social distancing, stay at home as much as possible of the time being.
Practice stay at home if possible, especially if there is a stay at home order dictated by your county or state (unless you are deemed one of the essential categories and not Gamestop)
Support the fight against COVID-19 by sharing your unused GPU processing power with the Folding@Home projects. See /r/pcmasterrace/fhb5e4/
If you want to play a game, play the Fold.it game, which can help find the science find the protein binders to help stop the spread of COVID-19 (more info at https://fold.it/portal/)
If you can, volunteer to local food bank services to help provide food for the elderly and cannot go out and get food. Call those neighbors who are elderly and check if they need anything that you could possibly get for them.
ProtoShop is open source, you can download it from the link I posted above. The VR version is based on the Vrui VR toolkit, which runs on Linux and supports the HTC Vive headset.
But for classroom use, there is FoldIt which is a gamified version of the same approach (FoldIt was inspired by ProtoShop). You should give it a shot.
You might be interested in some of the projects on the BOINC distributed computing platform, they are using molecular modelling to see how drugs bind to human molecules to actually see how they work. You can play https://fold.it/portal/ to see how it works. Perhaps this might inspire you to start with a less ambitious goal and make some progress. Perhaps you can contribute something they didnt think of yet as a feature...
There's a game called Fold it (https://fold.it/portal/) that helps science advancing through gaming, I don't know the details, but apparently it's something like "people are better at intuitive stuff than computers so we ask them to collectively solve proteins structure"
There are games like Nevermind that are being currently analyzed to see if they could be used for therapy against stress, the game makes itself scarier if you don't keep your heartbeat and facial features calm, thus teaching people to deal with their phobias in an actually safe but immersive environment.
Also overall knowledge, 99% of my history and English knowledge comes from videogames, and I have really high grades in these.
Proteins don't always stay in the first 'low point', sometimes they stay there for a little while then change conformation. Often proteins can change significantly when bound by something.
There is a great citizen science project on it. https://fold.it/portal/ This is in the top 3 most successful citizen science projects.
You have specific enzymes in your body called "proteases" that break down the proteins. This is a good article that covers all you need to know about proteases: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6968/full/nature02263.html
The short answer to your question is that we have translocated proteins to show that they work the same in different environments (i.e. proteins can work in foreign cells that do not naturally produce them) and we can modify the amino acid sequence to show that if you alter it drastically the protein stops working in all environments.
A slightly longer answer is that the structure and function is not encoded in just the amino acid sequence for all proteins. The short simple answer above only applies to spontaneous/self-folding proteins. Basically after a protein is produced from mRNA it needs to fold into a particular 3-dimensional structure to work. For those that can spontaneously do this the amino acid sequence encodes everything the protein needs to fold into the right structure and function. For others a helper called a chaperone protein is needed to have it fold correctly. Without the right chaperone the amino acid sequence just encodes non-functional junk. Telling exactly what a protein does just form it's amino acid sequence is extremely hard though. Similarity searches are the most popular technique (you probably do what proteins that look like you do). And there are lots of complicated models to determine how proteins fold. You can even play a game where you help researchers model protein folding called Fold It
Foldit! An ongoing problem in the biology and biochemistry world is the question of "Why do proteins fold into the conformations they do? How can we predict this?"
Foldit allows normal people to solve protein folding conformations in the form of a game, and its simple enough that a kid can do it, but challenging enough to slow an adult down and make them think.
And, as a bonus, you're doing the work and solving problems that a lot of the top scientists could not handle.
Game link: https://fold.it/portal/
A little bit of background information: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/gamers-solve-molecular-puzzle-baffled-scientists-f6C10402813
Sure, I guess I'll see how people respond in this thread, anyway. :p
I worked on Foldit as an undergrad (Computer Science) for about six months from the end of 2008 to the beginning of 2009. I was mostly redesigning the user interface, tutorial system, and introductory levels to make it easier for new players to learn to play (which is super hard - I wrote about it here for my senior thesis). The game is still a work in progress - the idea of a public launch is not a very helpful way to think of it. When I came on the project, it was already in public beta and had undergone a number of changes since its inception, but the project was really just beginning.
Like many ideas in games and the interactive medium, I think it is currently more interesting in its potential than in practice. But it is still valuable. We're just so early in this whole field, still.
I also inadvertently created and stepped into the role of community manager during my six-month stint on Foldit, which has some interesting parallels to what I've found myself doing with the rest of the soylent community these past six months. Ahh, this brings back memories:
http://fold.it/portal/node/986260
https://fold.it/portal/node/986222
> Till we meet again little axcho! (....don't know why, but I always considered you a young guy, excuse the "little" part if you turn out to be 60 years old though, lol).
> Anyway, you're a fun guy, I think it's the enthousiasm that makes me believe that you're still very young. Hang on to that forever, and have fun with whatever you'll be doing next.
:)
If you're into bioinformatics or just want to try out using python to learn biology, try Rosalind.info. This is what I used to essentially teach me the ropes for my bioinformatics lab.
There's also Foldit for protein folding.
[](/cooldash) Ah, yeah, if it's for a weapon that you don't have then you might as well sell it... or just go get that weapon, heh.
Oh wow, interesting. Is the second version the ultimate melee weapon or something? That'd be fitting. [](/sp) [](/dashie) It was presented as a game where you just click and drag pieces of a protein to achieve some goal. I forget what the goal was. But I think I found the game. [](/sp) [](/dashiebeg)My main monitor won't turn on. Looks like it's dead, or maybe the power cord doesn't work anymore. I'm guessing power cord, since this was kinda sudden. I'll probably have to get a new one.
I think educational video games rank pretty high up there actually. I think we're on the dawn of introducing more gameplay-like elements to the way we work and learn. Educational games, open source software, and things like this feel like just the beginning to me.
And on a smaller more personal level I am having a lot of fun with this reddit bot I've been working on. It just posts around pretending to be a normal user. It lasted a month before someone figured it out yesterday. :( so I'll either work on disguising it more or make a new account for it I guess.
> You're not folding proteins in game dev
While I'm being somewhat flippant, it is an aspect of gamedev that I think is somewhat overlooked. Namely, you have to be a subject matter expert not only in the game development itself, but also in the thing you're attempting to simulate.
This is a great question, and I'm really excited to see what everyone else has to say but really it will all come down to what interests you in biology. The obvious contenders here would be Charles Darwin (everyone should read Origin of Species) and the more controversial Richard Dawkins who frankly I don't like but I do like some of his books! Would recommend anything David Attenborough - I'm actually a physical chemistry undergrad but his series Kingdom of Plants (which is very recent) really got me interested in botany and the more I learned about plants the more excited I was to go to my zoology classes and ecology classes as well to watch everything come together! If you're interested in zoology, conservation or animal ecology there is tonnes of great documentaries out there for example I'm a big fan of the monster fish series run by national geographic scientist Zeb Hogan (freshwater ecology) and theres a great yet simplistic show by a virologist that airs often here in Australia called Bite Me with Dr. Mike Leahy.
As far as interesting topics go I love a bit of palaeontology and I'm really interested in evolutionary biology as a whole but looking at problems like protein folding are really more up my ally (phys chem background I guess) so I've gotten really into this foldit game https://fold.it/portal/ which is all based on using the brute force of citizen science to work out protein confirmations. Of course theres plenty of great Ted talks as well, although many are a bit to wishy washy!
Also I'll add if you're looking for something a bit more out there and sort of abstract the book biocentrism by Robert Lanza is worth knocking back to get some perspective on ideas regarding consciousness and it's role in the universe.
Well the reason I was asking really is that I was talking to someone yesterday and it came up that Angry Shark had been watched over 2 billion times... Even assuming 2x10⁹ that still works out at over 30,00 years of peoples time.
That then got me thinking about the longer videos out there and how much time goes to watching them, if all those people chipped in 30 minutes or an hour of time to move one project forward. It would make quite a significant advancement.
But then looking at the responses here I am now realising people needed that time not 'doing' something. And the time used like that to unwind probably let them recuperate for getting on with things later.
It would be amazing though if there was a way of combining the two, a bit like this protein folding game.
Also, if your actual question is finding examples of gaming being used to advance technology you do need to take a look at the serious games market. Of course these are not the most successful, big game titles but is that a problem? A lot of people join the games industry with the thought e.g I want to work on the next Call of Duty or Last of us or whatever. But is that important to you? You could very well work on projects that provide people who are paralyzed with games that can be played by scanning eye movement.
https://fold.it/portal/info/science Fold it is a project where players fold proteins and help medical research by that. These projects exist, they are just a little more niche. But you coild totally try to get into that sector instead of the entertainment industry.
came to suggest FoldIt. folding@home runs on the background of a citizen's computer, but FoldIt is the game version they can actually play and have fun with. FoldIt players have solved real scientific problems and been included on peer-reviewed published research papers.
I don’t think it’s that huge. Protein folding is very important, but it is well understood and computers already help with it a lot, especially with simpler proteins. Humans help more with more complex ones. See the foldit game. This article is confusing because it is ambiguous as to whether the major advance is in AI or in protein folding. But if you know the territory it’s clear that the advance is (reportedly) in AI. Solving more folds more quickly will be good, but we are already well on the way toward doing that, and the fact that humans are a big part of the system isn’t a deficit. Because humans turn out to be better than machines at solving complex proteins, it’s been a major site for AI advocates to try to knock down. I’m sure they will eventually and maybe have now. But it’s not clear this will speed up protein folding problems much. Even the proposed solutions require empirical testing as the article states rather unclearly.
Unless you have some kind of PHD in this field, there is no thinking for yourself. I will fix it for you.
Noicesocks: Seems like you aren't supposed to choose for yourself
Don't come back and say anything unless you can go here: https://fold.it/portal/info/about
and solve a virus like HIV in a few folds. Then you can say something stupid, like think for yourself. Thinking for yourself requires understanding. Hell, I have have next to zero understanding of bio engineering.
If you want to learn about the biophysics behind protein structure, there’s a game called FoldIt that you can play, and learn about the physical mechanisms behind protein folding as you play:
I think it could be a cool place to start, and you can compete online to help develop new medically relevant structures and stuff.
That's a crowdsourced computer game that's a lot of fun. Although no coding is required, you get to play around folding proteins into their least energetic state since some geniuses coded it. The campaign is tough enough, but the puzzles are real!
I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:
I did the honors for you.
^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3
I think that you misunderstood the question that OP is asking. I believe OPs question is in reference to a protein folding game run by the Rosetta@home folks called “FoldIt”. Not folding@home.
Allow me to introduce you to Phylo.
An online video game that crowdsources sequencing of DNA.
Helping cure disease and make the world a better place through video games.
How about Foldit?
Allow me to introduce you to Phylo.
An online video game that crowdsources sequencing of DNA.
Helping cure disease and make the world a better place through video games.
How about Foldit?
Oh seriously, you know better than that mindset. You are simply not interested in the majority of them. Neither am I.
Need something, anything, more challenging and results oriented.
Use your experience and knowledge to effect a change and do some good. Solve a puzzle: https://fold.it/
Your weekly PSA on COVID:
What to do:
Check with your local, county, state health officials on updates to your situation; they are most likely on social network (like Twitter) to provide up to date information. Check with your local news on things pertinent to your area. Sites like https://www.who.int/, https://www.cdc.gov/, and your local state .gov website provide up to date factual information.
Check with your place of work/studies/etc on telework/remote work/work from home. They may offer it depending on the type of work. Check with some of your services/utilities to see what they are offering to help you/anyone to help overcome this pandemic.
How you can help fight the spread:
Practice social distancing, stay at home as much as possible of the time being.
Practice stay at home if possible, especially if there is a stay at home order dictated by your county or state (unless you are deemed one of the essential categories and not Gamestop)
Support the fight against COVID-19 by sharing your unused GPU processing power with the Folding@Home projects. See /r/pcmasterrace/fhb5e4/
If you want to play a game, play the Fold.it game, which can help find the science find the protein binders to help stop the spread of COVID-19 (more info at https://fold.it/portal/)
If you can, volunteer to local food bank services to help provide food for the elderly and cannot go out and get food. Call those neighbors who are elderly and check if they need anything that you could possibly get for them.
FoldIt players solved a decade-old HIV enzyme problem in under 3 weeks. It's not quite the same as the Cyberpunk ARG, though.
Automatic translation here
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU4qOebhkfs
For those unaware this has been around for a long time, along with foldit. LTT does a great job breaking down what this is and how it helps us (the people studying disease).
Essentially, it works in the way any massive supercomputer would. It uses a ton of computational power to come up with ways protein fold. This takes a ton and ton of power to do. For instance, we have massive servers on the campus I work and protein folding experiments still take a ton of time to run. Instead of using one big machine to try to find optimal protein folding for every protein/disease out there, Folding@Home uses everyone's computers around the world to accomplish the task. So your grandmother can help find how a protein folds (and thus how we can combat a disease) while she is browsing facebook. It all runs in the background of your computer and takes up and computational power you do not currently need. The better your computer is (i.e. more cores, better GPU, etc.) the more it can help in the field.
To all the frontliners out there, you have our immense gratitude for what you do. Keep safe, and know that the world is behind you. :)
Personally, my city is now on week 3 of a total lockdown and my GPU died last month :(
At least I still have my laptop and can contribute to folding@home inbetween borderlands 3 sessions. I've also installed the puzzle game from these guys to help develop antiviral meds!
Currently folding on all my spare servers and computers. My basement is quite hot these days. I've also tried to spread awareness of the fold.it project that can be used manually on machines that are not well suited for brute force folding substituting most of the machine power for human brain power. Haven't got enough spare time myself working more than full time and taking care of my family in the evenings.
Also been staying at home since before the government recommendation came.
It happened for more than 5 hours when I posted this. Fold.it was mentioned alot in media and facebook at that time, maybe the server was overwhelmed ? After a few hours the download speed went up again.
My point is that in case fold.it gets the media attention again the download servers will surely be overwhelmed again and an official torrent would mitigate that risk.
We won't know until we test them. We're excited to find out!
It's now possible to test a large number (i.e. tens of thousands) of computer-designed proteins fairly easily, so 99 is pretty small by comparison. But Foldit players are extraordinarily creative. There is wider diversity in this 99 than in a typical library made by professional scientists. That's really the beauty of Foldit.
We can't be sure about which will work ahead of time, but we do some extra analysis on Foldit solutions to try and pick out the most promising candidates. You can read more about that analysis on our blog here: https://fold.it/portal/node/2009115
Yes! After that video, we wrote a blog post about our actual analysis, and how we choose candidates for lab testing: https://fold.it/portal/node/2009115
In short, we can calculate some metrics that are known to correlate with successful protein designs in other projects. We also ensure that the designs are binding to a region of the spike protein that will block the host-receptor interaction. We use those metrics to pick out the most promising candidates for this project to take into the laboratory.
You're right that all of this feedback could be added to the game, and we're working on it! Evaluating designs by eye is great for a quick-and-dirty analysis. Once you get an eye for it, some things do jump out at you (e.g. "this design does not have enough helices"). But our goal is to formulate that feedback into rules that guide Foldit players (e.g. ">80% of a design must be helices").
https://foldit.en.softonic.com/
You have such a slow download speed from the https://fold.it website? Either your ISP service is slow, you have a lot of proxies or a server on one hop that is crapping out, or some other issue, as mine has always downloaded in seconds, but then again, it sounds like you live overseas and it is hosted on a US Server...so maybe that is the issue?
Anyway, I hope the above link is what you were looking for.
Download folding@home and/or fold.it on your computer.
​
folding@home is a distributed computing research project where your computer will download various proteins related to various cancers, parkinsons, alzheimers, and others (COVID19 included). Your computer will download a protein at random and run through a simulation folding and unfolding the protein, then sends the results back to be aggregated and studied. All of this is done in the background while you are browsing reddit or have stepped away. It borrows your processing power for the greater good.
​
fold.it is an app that lets you play a game where you are folding/unfolding proteins. Just like folding@home, the results of your game are studied and aggregated for the greater good.
​
The big difference between the two is that folding@home is a passive program running in the background, while fold.it requires you to play and interact with it.
I work on the Foldit project - this is just a small list of our total publications.
In particular, 2 other exciting results:
We recently published in Nature that Foldit players were able to design completely novel proteins. They used the program to design 4 experimentally confirmed structures. This is probably our most exciting result so far, because it shows that Foldit (both the players and the software) are capable of creating new proteins from scratch, rather than just folding up exiting proteins. This opens the door for new challenges like the ones we're doing right now - creating new proteins to try and target Coronavirus and other diseases.
Another cool result came out of our scripting system that lets players automate their own algorithms. In this particular case, Foldit players actually independently discovered an algorithm that scientists at University of Washington had discovered internally, but had not yet published. This was a particularly effective algorithm, so it was very cool to see.
cit from "r/coronavirus":
FYI: the portal to download the game is here: https://fold.it/portal/
Google search results will end up on malware sites which the users below have downloaded
Are you using the right one? People here are saying there's - somewhat incredibly - a malware version out there. The real website is https://fold.it/portal/
(and if you downloaded a malware version you might want to scan your computer)
Foldit is also a good way to help. It's basically a gamified version of Rosetta@home that combines manual protein designs with automated folding.
It was created by the University of Washington and has seen a big resurgence due to their recent Coronavirus puzzles. They have an active Discord as well with a lot of cool technical explanations and help for beginners.
Fold.it, it's literally a game related to unwinding proteins, and has numerous unsolved coronavirus puzzles to be solved. It was found that after a week of play that gamers were more quickly able to adapt to complex molecules and deconstruct them. Clearly this is the perfect time to work out some glitchless speedrun strats.
There’s a citizen science project you can take part in right now, by playing a fun game that helps to solve protein folding structures. They have some coronavirus puzzles which will help develop antivirals against it:
Here's the website: https://fold.it/portal/node/2003714
And here's a guide tailored for the corona virus: https://fold.it/portal/node/2009051
I hope this doesn't count as advertising as I'm not shilling. I simply think it's a good idea.
This link is also in the article, but here is the direct link to download the game;
Here is a link to the actual game download that is also included in the linked article...
Parce qu'il est bien connu que la sentence d'un procès est en relation affine pure avec les sommes en jeu ; tout l'autour n'a aucune influence sur celle-ci.
Sérieusement, va plier des protéines si tu as du temps à perdre...
Hi, there's some good information here: https://fold.it/portal/node/2008989 and in the other blog posts. Basically, high scores are a good indicator that your protein is doing well and would be useful to scientists- but there are some other goals to strive for as well that are not necessarily reflected in high scores. I would recommend asking the Discord or the in-game chat for advice, and the blog post I linked gives a lot of good information too.
Hopefully it works for some people, who are playing at the moment and contributing. Perhaps the servers are full and the overwhelming people willing to support the program are kept out in order to prevent overloading. I really hope it is working for some people and it is helping the cause, but it would be great if we are notified about why this is happening on the Fold.it site.
From the website https://fold.it/portal/info/about
>What big problems is this game tackling?
>
>Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
I'm not knowledgeable of the science of this, but as far as I understood from the video.
- Coronavirus has special proteins to connect to a human's cell.
- 2. We can neutralize (bind) these proteins by other proteins that must have a specific structure.
- And to find these specific structures of binder proteins gamers can help by solving this 3D puzzle on Fold.it.
But this is just my interpretation of it.
In molecular biology it is called protein folding which reminds me there is a collective game some people play to solve cures for ailments and viruses called foldit. The sequence is much more complicated than the simple analogy I used, but it is possible to solve the sequences using this video game however the flu has a few hundred thousands of years of evolution on it. Here is a link.
maybe check out
r/slavelabour
for ideas, many ads are not regular jobs but rather fun little activities (e.g. "for 5$ i'll draw you as an amoeba")
you can also pick up chess (or checkers, or go) and study the books either online or offline or both , and then use the pc to find similarly skiled opponents, the amount of theory and educational chess matches to analyze is basically infinite, as long as the game interests you.
trading card games are fun too. magic the gathering in particular (magic arena is the most recent f2p one) offers a lot of complexity and variety of cards and expansions for all kinds of players, so even if you aren't the competitive type but rather the creative type you can go very deep and come up wiith unique decks that work on a unique combo or strategy.
If you are up for something incredibly interesting but also hard, I'd start reading about cryptocurrencies.
You can either become a developer or an investor. The even more interesting part is that as a programmer you don't necessarily have to code a new blockchain-cryptocurrency, you can become an ethereum programmer and create a new token and write smart contracts without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
You can create economical games, or proper videogames with a blockchain component such as "ownable" assets, or mix the two.
You can take a 'student-researcher' approach and study just-released coins and see if there's any with actual potential by reviewing the team and the whitepaper, and if you find anything valuable, you can mine a ton of them before they are even on the market, while difficulty is very low, for big gains if the project does have success.
You can collect games for free on pc, thanks to having so many platforms that fight for a userbase that they periodically give out big free games.
r/freegamefindings
r/freegamesonsteam
Solve puzzles - Fold proteins to help cancer cure research! https://fold.it/portal/
There's FoldIT: https://fold.it/portal/index.php?q=
and Phylo: https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/
I believe that they are designed by academics are actually reviewed by the scientists to solve crystal structures and refine algorithms.
All all those teritany folds and twists are so fucking complexe that we can't even figure them out with supercomputers. Well we can and do but it's crazy.
In some cases HUMANS can figure it out better than supercomputers.
https://www.hhmi.org/news/computers-make-big-strides-predicting-protein-structure
Pewdiepie has cured an entire disease, just by playing a video game!
Pewdiepie played Fold It, a game that helps scientists figure out how diseases work, so they can make cures.
When you play this game, you are the smartest person alive! You are smarter than Elon Musk when you play this game.
Not an app and not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for but I was showed fold it back in highschool when it first started out. You can manipulate proteins and actually help with scientific papers through wefoldit. https://fold.it/portal/ you have to download it and run it on a computer I believe. Not sure if link will work and sorry if formatting is strange I'm on mobile.
If you want to learn more while playing a game and actually contributing to scientific research check out the "fold it" protein folding game for PC. Not making this up. Because protein synthesis is so complex with room for error, the data required for research is astronomical and the game helps.
NASA actually made a moon landing game: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/ltp/games/moonbasealpha/index.html
It was kinda meh though.
The Civilization series tried to show how modern society evolved from humble agrarian roots, leading to guilds and crafts and the sciences and eventually to nuclear destruction and pollution and other modern-day societal problems. It eventually led to Alpha Centauri, the spacebound sequel, and that covers themes like habitat destruction.
Kerbal Space Program gives you an appreciation for the difficulties of rocket science.
Bridge building simulators (there's a lot of them) gives you a slight appreciation for civil engineering and bridge safety.
There's a protein folding game: https://fold.it/portal/
It can also help a person deal with working to a deadline, improve their communication skills, how to deal with antagonistic people, or the big one here. You can help with SCIENCE
It's never actually worked for me in an interview, but it's a good exercise in finding connections.
My I recommend Kerbaling? It's great because it's got a huge mod community, it's incredibly challenging and it constantly tries to increase the realism.
https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/
Also if you want to help science try Foldit. It's a game that helps to solve protein folding. Your gaming will always have a point and purpose.
Hrm, looks like someone's had this idea before. A few years back someone implemented a kinect plugin. Additionally there's an APIish component that allows user scripts to hook into and modify protiens programatically. That doesn't really seem applicable here, but the kinect piece might be a step in the right direction.
Looks like there's been some discussion in the past of open sourcing it. It's surprising to me that a tool like this would remain proprietary though.
We already have human-computer computation; there's https://fold.it/portal/ and https://www.zooniverse.org/projects. The problem is that even though you don't need any training it's still too difficult for the average person to do.
In case anyone's wondering: Protein folding is how proteins assume their shape. "Unfolding" them and figuring out how proteins fold can help figure out where and how things go wrong. Obviously complex proteins are a tad tricky to figure out, which is where the computations come in.
If you don't want to donate your spare processing power for power consumption reasons or whatever, you can play the free puzzle game and do the same thing:
Not OP since I don't know any MMOs, but the only time I've thought of those words together was foldit, a game where you try to fold proteins in 3D space based on chemical rules. But it's more a crowdsourcing puzzle that tries to get "players" to figure out real research than a fun MMO game.
Proteins are generally made up of 20 different kinds of pieces/amino acids. If you look at the long name of titin, you'll see that it's essentially just a combination of those 20 amino acids listed over and over again in a particular order.
So, to answer your question, it will list the specific pieces the protein is made up of. However, instead of using terms like "yellow square," it will use terms like leucine or glycine. It's a bit more complicated since legos always move in straight lines. Real proteins have more complicated structures, so technically speaking, the legos only give you the primary structure of the protein. However, given some information about the properties of the different types of amino acids/lego pieces, you could figure out the protein's exact shape using just the names of the individual pieces inside the protein.
If you'd like to see some ridiculously complex structures in action, I'd recommend downloading Foldit, a game in which you learn to play around with real protein shapes and see how individual pieces interact with one another.
Well, with regards to preventing bots from taking funds from users what about taking this https://fold.it/portal/ and making it reward users on their manual human contribution or a similar human powered task other than clicking on the coins in the game?
Edit:
And I can't remember where I read this, but i remember reading about an AI/Chat bot that rewarded users with a share in the potential future company for every snippet of information you shared to it. Think this could be improved on with the blockchain? An AI that runs on everyone's machines and rewards you for your computational power and or information you provide it.
Double edit:
The hashcat idea on one hand could totally be beneficial to the overall security field if it was unveiled that there was a distributed supercomputer that anyone could hire for cracking purposes; forcing everyone to properly encrypt/salt their passwords and improve security online.
Thank you for the thorough response! I understand that specificity is key, and I'm glad you brought up the idea of reverse engineering an antibiotic based on the structure of a particular strain. I messed around with this program called "Fold-it" which my professor recently introduced to our class. While using the program, I thought about how antibiotic-resistant strains can't possibly be permanently resistant to every possible manipulation of the "key" since the configuration of proteins necessary for the livelihood of the strain is limited to factors such as free energy. So when people speak of a bacteria that will wipe out humanity because of it's resistant to anything we throw at it, well, I can only hope we find the right key sooner or later, simply because the key has to exist.
I think it could come from that, but it would take a bit of creativity.
Finding signal in noise like Seti@home might be easier, what is that, a fourier transform?
I could imagine a protein folding problem, with the energy being the difficulty.
I would love it if FoldIt problems could be turned into coins. https://fold.it/portal/
Then human-assisted computers would beat out computers alone. Then people with CPUs or ASICs would still both not be as good as a pile of home users with a brain, skill, and a graphics card.