Video Games Advance Science

Scientists have developed a video game that allows players to predict and build protein structures that have stumped computers because of their inadequate spatial reasoning. “People playing a simple video game can match, and even surpass, the efforts of a powerful supercomputer to solve a fiendishly difficult biological problem, according to the results of an unusual face-off. The game isn’t Pac-Man or Doom, but one called FoldIt that pushes people to use their intuition to predict the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a protein. … When the game debuted, Arthur Olson, a molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, told Science that he doubted that nonscientist players could get very far. ‘I’m thrilled to be wrong,’ he now says. ‘What I didn’t know is that this game would actually create experts.'”