Zoran Popvic, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, wrapped up the morning session by talking about the work he and his group have done on FoldIt, a game created by scientists at the university to help solve real-world scientific problems. The game challenges players to predict the shapes that proteins fold into. (Proteins are made up of long strands of amino acids. While the order of those amino acids is easy to determine, it is very difficult to predict the actual 3-D shape that the protein will take.) It is both time-intensive and costly for scientists and computers to figure out the structure of proteins, but the game, which allows players to move proteins around and contort them in various ways, allows thousands of people to use their collective brainpower to figure out answers to these outstanding questions.
In fact, the game has yielded several important scientific breakthroughs, including predicting the structure of a protein that scientists had been working on for 15 years. (Game players took three weeks to figure it out.) Looking at the demographics of those who play and solve the puzzles, it's clear that most of the people working on FoldIt are not biochemists. In fact, in a breakdown of the top 20 players on FoldIt, researchers found that about three-quarters of those players had one undergraduate course about biochemistry at most, and almost half had no biochemistry experience whatsoever, while only two of the top 20 players were professionals in the field.