In the future we will all be scientists

Gamers solve long standing science puzzle

Thoughts?

The specific group responsible sounds more like a ThinkTank of people in the industry, as oppossed to regular 'Gamers'. Still the concept of Crowdsourcing intrigues me.
Discovery by council is how we gained most of the knowledge we currently possess. With discovery by academia only coming to prominence in the last 200 years.

Back in humanities youth, philosphers were very very important, using logic and reasoning to figure out how things worked, why things happen etc. It was in these forums, bouncing ideas from one mind to another, that the majority of our knowledge began to take shape.

Fast forward a few centuries and we started getting a bit of a big head. Once we had a foundation of knowledge it was determined you had to 'learn' what we'd already 'figured out' after decades of this the paradigm shifted. Philosphers started being regarded more and more as crackpots while academia remained stagnant and confident in their superiority.

Long gone are the days when a group of Humans could sit around and play connect the dots with the world. Because we've been there and learned it. Today sadly, philosphers are more likely to be seen in boxes in alleys than in large venues. With the rigid structure of learning being reinforced, regadless of it's effectiveness.

Anyways, didn't mean to go off on a tangent.

Thoughts?
Wave of the future or just a passing fluff piece?

I'm hoping it's consistently used, even if it's only in specific cases such as this- According to the article, they solved this problem in 10 days when 'scientists' hadn't been able to figure it out in years. Thinking that way, if they put all their current problems out there to the world then checked or double checked the 'highest scored' solutions, they could conceivably make a big leap forward in understanding of scientific facts and medicines.

What downsides are there to putting more of these problems out there?

And my childhood dream of going to outer space by playing arcade games gets one step closer to reality

Seriously though, that's some pretty amazing stuff. It will be really interesting to see what else they can do with this.

This is interesting and cool, but the scientists who put the game together did all the hard theoretical work to make it possible. The players were essentially used as brute-force processing power. The same players would have had no chance at all to solve this problem without the scientists.

In a way, it's like setting 240,000 monkeys to banging on keyboards, and then searching for Shakespeare's words in their output.

Problems can only be solved this way only if someone is brilliant enough to pose the question in a way that allows the resources of many minds to be used without having to be versed in all the minutiae of the field.

So dissing modern academia and implying that ancient philosophers could solve today's infinitely more detailed and specialized problems is drastically underestimating the complexities of modern science. The multitudes won't be able to resolve complex problems unless they are framed properly.

After all, crowd-sourcing gave us the ideas that the earth was flat, that it was at the center of the universe and that property values will always go up.

It's like that time they solved an Ancient maths proof using an mmorpg!

I think what they did was very clever. A lot of gamers like to solve puzzles. Some like solving spacial puzzles (see Portal). Some like working on physical spacial puzzles (see Rubik's Cube).

Foldit simply uses the rules of protean folding as the basis of a game. Same way some of those bridge building games use the rules of physics/mechanics as a basis. The fact they made a "level" out of a real world problem is great. But this doesn't raise the person or team who "solved" it better than the scientists who worked on the problem before them nor does it make scientists obsolete.

Haha. Man this is great. Give a large enough group of gamers a problem and they will not only find a solution, the will find the most efficient solution. What is figuring out how to farm most efficiently in an MMO translates to science in the real world!
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Or something like that.

That's pretty damn sweet.

And, hey, that PROVES that games aren't bad for you

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.