Please stop posting articles with link bait titles. Even the abstract of the original article has more information [1].

[1] http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nsmb.2...

This seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf

This has always reminded me of the pilot episode of Stargate Universe, where Eli Wallace solves a real world complex math problem in a video game. Maybe Fold.It was thought up first, but it's a fascinating concept either way. It makes a person wonder what else could be accomplished via clever crowd sourcing.

Also see Google's reCAPTCHA project: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

That meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter

Ah. So these people are responsible for japanese, greek and formulas in my capchas.. they should really have a "I can't type this" button for more efficiency.

If I can't figure out a indecipherable glyph it's usually the word they need help with and if it's not a word I usually type in "NotAWord_<random text>" for it, you only need to get the one that google knows as well right. As long as everyone doesn't type in the same thing for the indecipherable portion it won't end up in ebooks.

The top button out of the three (⟲) in the column is it.

Is it really? I thought it only gave a new capcha, without me giving a reason. I mean, there is a difference between being unable to read a word because it's so mangled and not being able to type something because I don't have that typeset installed / can't read the language.

"Few of these players had any kind of background in biochemistry."

Nope you don't need knowledge in organic chemistry. You basically run through a tutorial on the "rules" and then you fiddle with 3D models trying to get them as packed together as possible to achieve a % which increases your score.

It's frustrating how this blogspam post, and the news articles it references, won't just simply link to the actual game's homepage: http://fold.it/portal/

all the pages in that site are identical to the home page. I guess there is some kind of problem going on.

Previous HN discussion about a different report of this same finding:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011044

For anyone interested in games incentivizing people to engage in research like this, I just saw a talk this morning that mentioned PhotoCity: www.photocitygame.com. It's a game to encourage picture taking of landmarks; the researchers then collate these into a 3d model.

There's also Eterna http://eterna.cmu.edu/ - I think it was on HN some time ago. (also biology-related)

looked interesting, but they want my email before they'll let me even try the tutorial. Disappointing.

this is a perfect exame of human computation

It is less "computation" and more "pattern matching/processing", something computers are really bad at, but people are relatively good at.

How is pattern matching not computation? The fact that you don't notice the underlying computational complexity is just a measure of how freaking good humans are at pattern matching.

It is true, at its core it is a form of computation. Though it blurs the line a little- the human brain isn't exactly pushing around numbers.

to be fair your computer isn't exactly pushing around numbers either. your computer does the same thing your nervous system does: push around electrical signals.

Gameification - just another example.

Maybe it's just me but this looks like major link bait no offense.