FOLDIT REVISITED—ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT FOR GAMERS.

FOLDIT REVISITED—ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT FOR GAMERS. I have posted before, most recently here, on Foldit, “a videogame with 57,000 registered users, in which players score points by finding chemically stable configurations for chains of protein molecules.” The link from two months ago was about an accurate model of one monomeric protease enzyme which Foldit players had helped discover. Now Foldit players have been credited with devising new algorithms which are tools for more quickly and effectively finding new models of protein molecules. (An algorithm is a step-by-step set of instructions for calculations. See this wikipedia article.) This research publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lists “Foldit Players” as one of the authors. The summary describes the successes of player-developed folding algorithms.