Gaming cancer: How citizen science games could help cure disease
(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)100 points by pseudolus 12 hours ago
100 points by pseudolus 12 hours ago
I keep returning to Zachtronics games endlessly in my free time, despite doing engineering work for 8-10 hours a day for the last months. Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that are basically using assembly. I even had someone reference that my latest Opus Magnum creation looks like cellular automata.
If you can simplify the problem/solution space into a puzzle, give me a leaderboard to compete against, more specifically let me compete against the people I care about, and give it the barest amount of polish, it's the kind of thing someone like me would obsess over.
> Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that are basically using assembly.
They are indeed "real," bonafide (though perhaps sophomoric) programming problems. There is an Exapunks puzzle that has you implement a form of binary tree search/traversal in assembly.
Esoteric programing languages is the term you both are looking for. I think the Zachtronic languages fit firmly in there somewhere.
Usually I see that term applied to Turing tarpits, intentionally obfuscated languages, joke/meme languages, or ones with highly heterodox syntax. Zachtronic languages are really none of these and closer to an assembly (reduced) instruction set architecture. What makes them toy-like languages is that the "machine" you're writing assembly for is rather oversimplified, and is in fact totally fictitious.
Zachtronics games are great! Very challenging. They made a big splash with Space Chem a while back. I need to go back to Opus Magnum and finish it...
Zach's next game Kaizen comes out tomorrow! https://coincidence.games/kaizen/
EVE Online has something similar with their Project Discovery!
I think there's still a challenge in balancing engagement and scientific rigor. Making a game that's genuinely fun and scientifically valuable isn't easy. But if done right, this could be a massive unlock and not just for cancer research, but for any complex system where intuition and creativity matter as much as formal training.
This article did such a disservice in describing how gamers were helping cure disease. I had to dig further. In the article linked, it does a much better job of explaining in my opinion.
"Paradigm Shift in Designing Therapeutics
This kind of work isn’t possible with computers alone. The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can’t solve this problem efficiently. However, humans are unparalleled at recognizing patterns. As Kim points out, computers don’t go into discussion forums to exchange ideas on how to push forward, but Eterna’s players do. They also constantly pick up on each other’s designs and then work to improve them.
“The players are designing things at incredibly granular levels while staying in touch with all the complex biological rules that we impose on them,” he says. “It’s allowing us to solve this incredibly complex problem through a video game interface. I honestly don’t think a lot of players fully understand the complexity of the problems that they’re addressing.”" https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/a-game-playing-app-m...
This description does a disservice claiming the work isn’t possible with computers. The papers on FoldIt do a much better job of describing taking optimization and communication strategies from players and implementing them in code to improve the existing algorithms.
I mean the first sentence about enumeration and efficiency just shows how shallow the discover article is; the whole area of optimization is about efficiently finding optimal solutions without enumerating all possibilities.
>This kind of work isn’t possible with computers alone.
To be honest this is the kind of science journalism quote which hurts science journalism a lot. Not only is it plainly false, the explanation is even worse. Any normal person reading this paragraph can not possibly come away with a correct understanding of the issue involved.
>The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can’t solve this problem efficiently.
The number of ways to go from city A to city B is also not enumerable by any computer. Yet efficient algorithms to find a good path exist. Clearly the size of the problem space is not the issue.
Great question. It's not better, but it's different. And different is useful for drug discovery, where you need to create a rich portfolio of possible designs.
Humans play games in unique ways. We link the Tetris game to DNA design, and the more diversity we can harvest in high-quality Tetris play, the more diversity we can explore in high-quality DNA design. So we will combine AI play and human play at the end.
And tbh partly it's to help get more people on the platform.
Nothing is crazy in 2025.
Have you considered reaching out to the existing tetris community and having them donate their 2-3h runs to science? There has been great progress lately in some godly players reaching and beating the kill stage that's been around as a show stopper for years.
Love this idea. Thank you! Any tips on where Tetris community congregates?
We have a live game to collect play data: https://exonic.ai/games/tilestack
Nobody would like these kinds of games just like nobody has ever liked "educational" games.
Why?
Because they try too hard, since their main objective is not to be a good game.
It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.
> Nobody ever
You might be exaggerating just a wee bit. Oregon Trail is the epitome of an educational game with lasting popularity, having been around pretty much as long as PCs. There are others -- Carmen Sandiego comes quickly to mind, and arguably even Kerbal Space Program. I'm sure some actual searching could compile a decent list.
> nobody has ever liked "educational" games.
You take that back, I loved educational games as a kid! There were indeed plenty of crappy ones out there, but some were really well-made. For example, Pink Panther's Passport to Peril was a charming point-and-click adventure that taught you about cultures in other countries.
There's a small cult following in the Netherlands for these types of edutainment games and a small group of people have set out to archive all of them: https://nationaalarchiefeducatievegames.nl/
The goal of these games is probably closer to Kerbal Space Program or MS Flight Simulator than an "educational" game.
Imagine playing within the parameters and finding a combination that brings unexpected results. It's probably harder to design than a standard game, but I think there's potential to have something pretty entertaining otherwise.
To be honest i agree, idk if I gained a ton of knowledge from KSP(I know what deltaV is now) but man does that stuff - as well as the flight simulators - let you grok some concepts better than any other way. Except actually flying I guess.
Seeing a planet on the map appear close but be invisible, then turning into my whole view really helped me grasp the distance between bodies in space. And KSP is scaled down!
Reading about stalls helps but crashing the tutorial Cessna twelve times really helps you understand what a stall is and why it happens.
Beg to disagree, plenty of people love puzzle games. This doesn't need to appeal to everyone. The article cites two examples of such games that lead to scientific progress.
Math Blaster, Number / Word Muncher, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, Crosscountry Canada
Plague Inc. is fun and (I assume) unintentionally educational.
It taught me a lot of (simplified) country locations and population sizes.
I think that's the point of parents comment, it's unintentionally educational, but primarily supposed to be fun. If it was built with educational as the primary concern, and fun being secondary, then probably the game wouldn't have wound up as popular.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's how I understood parents comment.
People will hurt themselves only to avoid boredom. People play souls games exactly because they are hard and offer a challenge.
The protein folding games paved the way to AlphaFold.
> It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest real fast.
Cue John Galt's 100-pages monologue at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
$60…
Did we jump 5 months into the future where $60 is the norm?
I’m guess this is probably aimed at the standard academic market, but even so more books like this could maybe help tackle cancer.
That and not having toxic drinking water from PFAS