Bench Press

We’ve written before about the ability of scientists to use distributed computing to pool the computing power of millions of users over the internet to solve sophisticated mathematical problems. But imagine if we could actually pool the brainpower of volunteers — but in a way which doesn’t involve jacking our brains into the Matrix.

Now, imagine if it could be fun for the volunteers.

Imagine no longer. Fold.It was created less than a year ago at the University of Washington to do just that. Instead of pooling the computational power of millions of machines, it seeks to pool the “human intuition” of volunteers to solve challenging protein folding problems.

The basic scientific concept behind Fold.It is that nature will “push” chains of amino acids to adopt a folded structure which minimizes free energy. But, while free energy calculations can be done relatively easily, finding the structure that minimizes free energy is not so easy to do and requires immense computational power (which is why Folding@Home uses distributed computing).

But, humans have a gift which computers do not: the gift of intuition. While we may not be able to compute the free energies in our head, we have the ability to make logical jumps and do complex reasoning. While we might not necessarily understand how to calculate the strength of a hydrophobic interaction, we know enough that we should place two hydrophobic (non-polar) leucine amino acids near one another. While we may not be able to write a mathematical equation to describe the arc of a polypeptide chain, we can conceptualize and visualize that a chain should be more “scrunched up” or “stretched out”.

And that type of “soft reasoning” is the processing power Fold.It seeks to capture. Fold.It created a game which literally depicts a “raw” protein chain in all its unfolded glory and asks human players to fold it. And, by deploying another unique characteristic of human beings, our competitiveness, the game encourages users to try to aim for the protein structure with the lowest free energy. The current aim is to see if the gift of human logic and competition is enough to solve complicated protein folding problems which currently require massive brute force calculations by supercomputers/distributed systems, and if so, if human 3D intuition can be “taught” to computers.

A quick overview of the game:

The novelty of this approach is striking. Interestingly, if Fold.It is successful, it will have done three very impressive (and very difficult) things:

• Successfully used crowdsourcing by pooling the wisdom of volunteers to solve problems which traditional brute-force computation finds nearly intractable
• Successfully use machine learning to copy the pooled wisdom of the volunteers to create smarter machines capable of solving the important protein folding questions which may underlie disease processes like cancer and Alzheimer’s
• Developed a new avenue with which to mobilize the public – by giving the public a tangible way to actively connect with and help an important scientific endeavor in a fun and easy-to-understand way

Check it out!