brynndragon: (In Vitro)
benndragon ([personal profile] brynndragon) wrote2009-01-02 01:36 am
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Playing with your proteins

If you enjoy puzzles, you could be playing games for science!

[identity profile] benndragon.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 05:36 pm (UTC)(link)
The point is to find the most likely way these proteins are folded, which is beyond our current problem-solving algorithms. The process of finding those unpredictable folds, while interesting (I hope they're collaborating with a psychologist who can get useful data from that information), is entirely beside the point. Which is good, because I strongly doubt a bunch of molecular biologists are going to want to come up with a study of human problem-solving that over a hundred years of looking into the matter hasn't tried yet (because if they were they'd be psychologists, not molecular biologists).

[identity profile] nyren.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 06:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, I think I'm completely misunderstanding the purpose of the test. I thought they were trying to improve their AI by augmenting their algorithms with human problem solving techniques as applied to this specific problem. But you're right, that's more CS/Psych than molecular biology despite the application. I guess they just need proteins folded various ways.

[identity profile] benndragon.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)
It turns out there are people who are not CS geeks who work in science and don't want to wait for y'all to figure these things out ;P.

[identity profile] nyren.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 06:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, pssh, we're just jealous that people's brains run better software than we can write :P




Yet.

[identity profile] benndragon.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 07:09 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, the brain does have a bit of a headstart in the optimization department ;P.

[identity profile] nyren.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Then clearly, we need more research into digital sentience and computational neuroscience to get ahead.