This is yet another reason why geeks will rule the world.
According to the
Sydney Morning Herald, gamers have solved the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like retrovirus that had thwarted scientists for a decade. With this solution, researchers can develop drugs that target areas of these enzymes (i.e. ‘finding a cure’ for AIDS). Said scientists’ computers were unable to determine the structures of the amino acids that made up this disease’s enzymes, as computers’ spatial reasoning skills are not yet as advanced as humans’.
(via
the Daily What)
In this case, people were asked to help solve the retrovirus enzyme’s structure through playing a game called
Foldit, where gamers competed to determine the amino acid structures in a puzzle-like approach. “To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks,”
SMH reported. The gamers won this game so quickly that they were given actual scientific citation credit in the
research paper. This may have been ‘the first time’ that gamers have solved a ‘long-standing scientific problem’. It makes me proud to be a geek, and I’m sure we’ll see more research like this in the future.
Harnessing the power of geeks reminds me of the old screen-saver program,
SETI@Home. Have any of you used it? The goal was to find alien life by using distributed computing to analyze of packages of radio noise collected from space. This program was an early attempt by the University of California at Berkley, and was renowned for being able to utilize downtime on computers. I don’t think it ever worked, and it sounds like
the program might be shut down this year. However, I do remember that I got a digital certificate for my work, and I was able to ‘donate’ my computer’s computation hours toward my High School’s total. I don’t know if it got my school any prizes or recognition for the effort, but it was worth a try.
But I got a shiny certificate!
I believe there are screen-savers that still work on solving problems like
finding a cure for cancer and calculating prime numbers to the bazillionth digit. I’m not sure how much effort is going toward such work nowadays, as it seems computation power can yield profit, as shown through
Bitcoin mining.
Called the future ‘digital currency’ by some, Bitcoins are a new form of digital cash that can be used to purchase goods or services. They can also exchanged with other real and virtual currencies, such as the US dollar and the
Linden Dollar. Bitcoins can
-only- be generated through winning a race to process blocks of ‘Bitcoin transaction logs’ which verify Bitcoin purchase, ultimately rewarding the processor with 50 of their own Bitcoins for the effort. Unlike Seti@Home, these packages are so complex that it would take years for a home PC to solve one block. Instead, massive computer farms are dedicated to ‘mining’ Bitcoins.
- Ok, it’s an 8-bit coin
I italicized -only- above because this process for ‘minting’ Bitcoins is under scrutiny; there is no centralized authority for this currency. Instead, Bitcoin is underwritten by a peer-to-peer network akin to file-sharing services like BitTorrent, with certificates and public-key encryptions that are signed during transactions ‘to prevent duplication’. Those blocks of transaction logs that are used to generate more Bitcoins are the only way to verify if the Bitcoins themselves are forged. (Thanks to the Economist.) However, Bitcoin currency exchange systems can be hacked, and many are unsure whether it is worth investing in. Do any of you mine or trade Bitcoins? If so, how has the experience been?
UPDATE 9/29: Thank you to all those that commented on this post. My research on Bitcoins security had holes, and I hope that the edits to the above section correctly address these issues. Also, now you can buy ‘real Bitcoins‘!
Tangential economic musing aside, the progress made by gamers and tech geeks alike is impressive. We’re kicking ass and solving the world’s problems, one win at a time. Game on.
