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Surprising Science

Online Gamers Aiding Science

The efforts of tens of thousands of players in an online game provided a rich, new set of search strategies for the prediction of protein structures. "Nature" explains the implications.

As the visual and strategic powers of tens of thousands of players in an online game provides a rich, new set of search strategies for the prediction of protein structures, “Nature” looks at the potential for complex scientific problems to be ‘crowd-sourced’ effectively using such interactive, online games. The example of the online gamers


and amino acid reserach shows that even computationally complex scientific problems can be effectively crowd-sourced using interactive multiplayer games. Eric Hand reports that “networks of human minds are taking citizen science to a new level.”


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