Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme within 3 Weeks

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - 15:30 in Biology & Nature

When video gamers armed with the world's most powerful supercomputers take on science and its most vexing riddles, who wins? Sometimes, it's the gamers.Humans retain an edge over computers when complex problems require intuition and leaps of insight rather than brute calculation. Savvy programmers and researchers at the University of Washington have tapped into this human "supercomputer" with Foldit, an online game that poses complex puzzles about how proteins fold, one of the hardest and most expensive problems in biology today. [More]

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