It seems that more and more researchers are making use of the power of the crowd to do their grunt work, especially when it comes to genetic research. McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has its own such puzzle game, known as Phylo, which is already helping to increase our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, epilepsy and diabetes.
Phylo, designed by McGill's Dr Jérôme Waldispuhl, is a Flash based puzzler that involves moving pieces of DNA, nucleotides, left and right in order to score more points than both the computer and other users. Points are allocated for matching together nucleotides of the same type, while points are deducted for nucleotide mismatches or gaps left in the genetic code.
Over 17,000 users have played the game over the last 12 months, according to McGill, which has resulted in 350,000 different solutions to various alignment sequence problems.
“Phylo has contributed to improving our understanding of the regulation of 521 genes involved in a variety of diseases. It also confirms that difficult computational problems can be embedded in a casual game that can easily be played by people without any scientific training,” Waldispuhl said in a press release.
Dr Waldispuhl says part of the appeal of such games is that they aren't perceived by users as time wasters; the games themselves contribute to important medical research that could ultimately save lives.
He also notes that games such as these make use of the human brains own advantages over computers, in particular the ability to interpret data, to recognise patterns visually, and to then categorise data in ways that are useful to scientists.
The project is similar to a recent project run by DARPA in the US asking users to devise methods for recreating shredded documents, and another game attempting to fold proteins related to HIV.
[McGill University]
