.

AIDS has been the biggest embarrassment to the scientific community, but it was government funded and monitored so it all makes sense.

Gamers solve AIDS by never getting laid, more at eleven.

Danarchy said:

Gamers solve AIDS by never getting laid, more at eleven.

Hooray for misleading headlines! The scientists involved found a way to solve the problem: they used gamers as human elements in a complex and carefully-designed computer system.

It's very much like how it was once common to use people hired for a small wage to computer firing tables for large guns. Mathematicians would set up the arithmetic for the people to do. Most of them were only trusted add and not perform other operations. No problem. Represent negative numbers as a different color: red + red = red, black + black = black, red + black = give it to the guy who gets paid to know more math.

Its like how I swooped in and solved that problem with Skulltag and Carnival even though I had no idea what the history of them was. I've been doing disease research lately to find cures for uncurable diseases. I figure that I'd use my time wisely to solve medical mysteries instead of solve bullshit ones like the Casey Anthony thing.

This reminds me of that thing Jane Mcgonigal wrote about where she believes there aren't enough people playing video games for long enough periods of time, and that the energy gamers have in solving puzzles and fulfilling objectives can be harnessed to solve real world issues.

yeah, that.

Grain of Salt said:

I didn't think it was that misleading. I guessed what it really meant as soon as I saw it, and I think you probably did too.

I certainly did, but most readers wouldn't necessarily guess the true conclusion. For that matter, it is possible for the other conclusion to have occurred, albeit extremely unlikely. The writing in these kinds of stories is usually crap, and I don't think trained writers should be excused for implying things that aren't true, even if they clarify themselves further down the page.

40oz said:

This reminds me of that thing Jane Mcgonigal wrote about where she believes there aren't enough people playing video games for long enough periods of time, and that the energy gamers have in solving puzzles and fulfilling objectives can be harnessed to solve real world issues.

I wholeheartedly feel this way. I've investigated bullshit things for days at a time... things like my friend is being stalked on Facebook and the Casey Anthony trial. Then I realized how stupid they are and so I started doing disease research for fun. Like a hobby. Now I've got a lot to talk about with my 2 doctor friends, my nurse cousin and her nurse coworkers.

Nurses.

More people should put their research of video game lore (Mortal Kombat, Elder Scrolls) and put it into researching real world problems that haven't been solved. If anything you have something to talk about with nurses. They brighten up and want to talk with you more.

I'm watching Jane right now... She speaks like and looks like and thinks like a friend of mine. She'd imagine all sorts of things and go off on crazy tangeants and she told me years ago that she thinks of everything as the Sims. Like we're all Sims. She works in daycare, because the 5 year olds totally understand her thought process, but adults don't... but that's maybe because she hasn't written a book and done standup comedy like Jane has.

geo said:

More people should put their research of video game lore (Mortal Kombat, Elder Scrolls) and put it into researching real world problems that haven't been solved. If anything you have something to talk about with nurses. They brighten up and want to talk with you more.

Alternatively, fuck off and let people research and show interest in what they want to. Not everybody has an apparent nurse fetish.

I don't either. But yes everyone should do as they please.

So this is basically a human-operated version of folding@home? And is considered the next frontier in computing? OK...surely makes the job of the algorithm designers a LOT easier, while their jobs are taken away by web developers.

Maybe I was too optimisting thinking that you could sit on your fat ass playing Doom or Sonic or a similarly cool game and getting shit done for science.

In a way, it's disconcerting to face the -very realistic prospect- that certain problems will from now on be solved "with computers", but not in the traditional sense of employing automated computational machines, but simply by using computers as communication devices in order to split a complex task among many human computers -ironically, that was the original definition of "computer".

So after nearly 70 years of progress in computing, we've came up with a technology (internet) which allows reverting to the pre-automated model with greater efficiency (and why not, if it's more economical and more efficient than the standard scientific R&D method?).

http://adriandayton.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/far_side_hopeful_parents.gif

Grain of Salt said:

Reality is Broken?

Looks slightly similar to:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

Maybe modern games are such shit because their designers have hidden ulterior motives to use crowd input to solve boring problems.

gggmork said:

Maybe modern games are such shit because their designers have hidden ulterior motives to use crowd input to solve boring problems.

Maybe Doom 3 is really happening on Mars in some sort of government conspiracy not even conspiracy theorists know about and need to watch people play Doom 3 to determine how to fend off the hellish threat with weapons.

Well, chinese sweatshops have long realized that minimum wagin' slaves behind a computer are much more effectve captcha breakers/forum spammers/mmo farmers and much harder to detect and stop than even the most cutting edge bots, and much easier to train compared to needing a MSc in DIP or AI.