Well this one's a beauty.
Fold.it is a downloadable game that challenges the player to fold, wiggle and cajole 3D proteins into the kind of shapes that nature allows. The scoring is calculated on how quickly and how few moves you created your permissable shape. You play on your own, but your score joins the huge web 2.0 style leaderboard ; surrounded by a pile of social activity buzzing around you, you really do feel that you are part of some strange world wide collective protein wranglers.
The amazing part is that this is another 'cognitive surplus' project, this one making use of a very particular facet of human intelligence - problem solving through spacial awareness. The software creators want to see if having a large user base (approximately 60,000) of human problem solvers trying to find all the possible protein shapes turns out to be as efficient, if not more so, as running the same problems through a research facility's computer simulation system.
"Predicting exactly how a long protein chain curls up as compactly as possible, amongst all the myriad possibilities, is a very hard problem to solve with computers," says David Baker, the game's inventor. This is the distributed computer idea that was brought to the world's attention through projects like SETI, but instead of idle processors being used to sort data or do some maths, human brain power is being used to do what it does best - play around, recognize patterns and solve puzzles.
Read this lovely round-up by New Scientist of some of the most interesting projects making use of the worlds human computers.
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