Playing with your proteins

[brynndragon]

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

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

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).

[nyren.livejournal.com]

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.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

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.

[nyren.livejournal.com]

Oh, pssh, we're just jealous that people's brains run better software than we can write :P




Yet.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Well, the brain does have a bit of a headstart in the optimization department ;P.

[nyren.livejournal.com]

Then clearly, we need more research into digital sentience and computational neuroscience to get ahead.