Gamers Solve AIDS Puzzle

[glottal]

This is pretty cool, though I have to wonder if the article is stretching the truth a little.

http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/58533-gamers-solve-aids-puzzle-where-scientists-fail

[Delling]

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

That said... I think this bit from the article: "Remarkably, the gamers generated models good enough for the researchers to refine and, within a few days, determine the enzyme's structure. Equally amazing, surfaces on the molecule stood out as likely targets for drugs to de-active [sic] the enzyme." ...is a fairly accurate if incomplete description of how it went down.

The thing is computer modeling relies heavily on human intuition essentially because to constrain recursive or iterative algorithms to produce "good" and progressively "better" models is a cumbersome process of translating that intuition into stop conditions. Sometimes, humans are just more efficient than computers at this because we can "eyeball" it while the computer has to do hundreds or thousands of calculations which eat up computer time when left to run for themselves.