Online Gamers Aiding Science

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.”