Win the Nobel Prize Playing a Computer Game

While becoming addicted to video games is generally considered a waste of your life, Foldit is a game where getting addicted enough could lead to a Nobel Prize! In this game, you are given a protein as an amino acid sequence that you can manipulate in all the valid ways, to fold into a protein. Your score can increase as you clear clashes, do packing, and increase numbers of hydrogen bonds.

So why could playing this game lead to winning a Nobel Prize? I'm not a biologist, but I'll explain my understanding of it. Proteins are made up of amino acids. We generally know the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein, but not the positioning of the sequence. Knowing the physical conformation can help predict how the protein would fit and thereby interact with other proteins. It can help us cure diseases ailing the world. This is called the protein folding problem.

The game is free, and starts with a well-done tutorial that teaches you about different maneuvers that can be done to fold the protein and obtain higher scores. Right now the game only presents puzzles already solved by scientists in the past 30 years of research, but it is finding that humans can obtain the highest score faster than computers have been able to do. Soon, they plan on posting unsolved puzzles to be solved. The creators imagine that there's a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see [it all] in their head, and hope that someone out there will be able to help solve these difficult problems.

While I was logged into the game and playing it myself, I noticed other players chatting in a little window that pops up. One commented that this game has taken over his WoW addiction. This is really a game. And it can really do something to help save the world.