Ok so via wakoopa I discovered fold it. It’s a project by the University of Washington along with support from HHMI, DARPA, Microsoft and Adobe. The idea is cool. Apparently the rosetta@home project has had distributed computers working on folding proteins for a while, but there’s something missing with computers. The way computers crack the problem is by trying every possible combination one by one. There is no intuition. No instinct. No visual cues. It just keeps trying all the combinations until it clicks into one that works.

This approach tries to bring that human intuition element into it. The game interface is programmed with the possible protein and amino acid behaviors and users can shake, wiggle, push, and pull them into new shapes.

Right now all the puzzles are just canned proteins that we already have the solution for. At some point though the idea is to add proteins that scientists don’t already have a good answer for and see if gamers and puzzle out a solution while working for the epeen high score.

I like the concept. I downloaded it and played for a while.

The problem?

As a game it totally sucks.

I think this line in the general chat really summed it up:

“Man the only people that will actually enjoy this as a game must be phd biochemists or something.”