Gamers decipher scientific mysteries

Gamers are helping researchers answer long-standing secrets in science, thereby opening new directions in the field of genetics.

Gamers around the world are spending a lot of time in front of the gaming screen. For many people, by the age of 21, their average gaming hours could be up to 10,000 hours, according to game designer Jane McGonigal posted on the Huffington Post website .

In the United States alone, there are about 183 million gamers, they spend most of their time on the game to defeat legendary monsters, shoot each other with aliens and rescue the princess from the cursed castle. Previously, people always thought that games were a time-consuming, useless form of entertainment without any benefit. However, it is quite surprising that expert McGonigal led the research results to confirm that the game is actually one of the most useful time-consuming measures for humans.

RNA sequence in the game

Not only supporting this idea, computer scientist Adrien Treuille of Carnegie Mellon University (USA) also devised ways to take advantage of creativity and hard work of gamers in answering the mysteries of science. He is the creator of 2 online games Foldit and EteRNA , with the goal of turning mysterious but extremely mysterious science into difficult and challenging tasks in the game. The results are really startling: the Foldit gaming community and the EteRNA (about 430,000 people) have continually made discoveries beyond the knowledge of scientists and supercomputers in the field of understanding the folding process. protein folding and synthesis of RNA (RNA synthesis).

For example, in early September, the player of the game Foldit helped to decipher the mystery of proteins, namely decoding the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme, which the scientific community gave up over a decade. year. This result will serve as a premise for further studies on HIV / AIDS. Their 'research' work has been published in the journal Nature.

Of course, gamers know they are working on a science project, but since the game is designed for entertainment, they don't hesitate to try it. And the more they play, the more they like it, like playing Lego games, according to CNN, explaining the explanation of Treuille expert. Easy to understand, gamers teach scientists and computers how to build genetic codes in the most logical direction. Those who make proteins that lose the least amount of energy are rewarded with points. In EteRNA, a Stanford University lab will build images of the RNA sequences the player created during the game.

Treuille expert insists that he believes that games can contribute positively to humanity and thereby help build a better world.'And I think we just touched the surface of that ability,' the scientist concluded.