Comment by bob_theslob646
Comment by bob_theslob646 21 hours ago
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.