Gamers Solve Real World Retrovirus Enzyme Secret

Video gamers may have opened the door a new AIDS drug. Researchers at the University of Washington challenged gamers to play Foldit and come up with the structure of a retrovirus enzyme - a task scientists could not solve over more than a decade.

The gamers did it did it in three weeks.

"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," said Firas Khatib of the University of Washington Department of Biochemistry. The enzyme in Foldit has a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and proliferates, the research group said. There have been efforts to develop AIDS-fighting drugs that block these enzymes, but it was unknown so far what the retroviral enzyme looks like.

Foldit was created by computer scientists at the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with the Khatib's lab. "The focus of the UW Center for Game Sciences is to solve hard problems in science and education that currently cannot be solved by either people or computers alone," said director Zoran Popovic, associate professor of computer science and engineering.

The solution of the virus enzyme structure, "indicates the power of online computer games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems."

According to Popovic, the game required gamers to learn real-world modeling problems and ended up engaging the public in scientific discovery. "The ingenuity of game players," Khatib said, "is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."

Popovic noted that Foldit provides evidence that games can "turn novices into domain experts" and the same approach is currently used "to change the way math and science are taught in school."