[karlhwhite]

Definitely an important observation, but I am very intrigued as to how this will progress in the future. If the level of accuracy can be determined by gamification of known protein structures, then I would love to see some metrics.

I would certainly love to see a world where complex problems are solved with the aid of the collective pursuit of very skilled and bright laymen/gamers. There are a lot of very clever and talented people in the world who, due to varying circumstances, are not in a position to put their problem-solving savvy to good use.

[joveian]

I played with fold.it a bit and my sense is that the implication of this article that random gamers are solving the problems isn't really correct; it seemed like most of the highest scoring individuals were either students or professionals in related fields. The game itself is not at all self-explanatory and it is not even always possible to follow what you are supposed to do without a solid background or quite a bit of study outside the game.