Some extol the “intellectual” capabilities of machines, others make sure to harvest the crowd-intellectual capabilities. Or, more accurately, collective human intelligence; they can call it that (for now) without risk.
EteRNA is a purpose-driven video game designed and released by two American universities (Stanford and Carnegie Mellon) to find solutions to problems related to the structure of RNA molecules. According to its designers, solving these problems by humans would be more economical (and faster) than assigning them to computer programs. For information and consideration, players (who registered as such on the game’s official site) could be as young as 13 years old. Which simply means (and is toxic to the certainties of many): provided that any “problems” can be framed as games, even middle-school students can contribute to solving them.
What’s interesting is that three of these gamers (there are now about 100,000…) took the initiative to invite other fellow players to co-author a paper, aiming for publication in a serious scientific journal. The topic: establishing new rules, not only for EteRNA but also for research on RNA structures. They presented their ideas and observations to the community, discussed them, submitted them to experts and…
The publication, which appeared on February 16 of last year in the Journal of Molecular Biology, is the first of its kind: gamers are putting forward staunch opinions on issues of high techno-scientific specialization for which they were never trained (in the conventional way)…