Foldit

Science may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s undoubtedly very important nowadays, especially since significant parts of our lives depend on it. Starting from the engineers who keep us warm and in motion at all times, all the way to the physicists who work on understanding the universe and the laws that govern it, every field in science has its own merits and a great impact on day-to-day life, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Foldit is a neat idea devised by the brilliant minds working at the University of Washington, which is both a game and a way for everyone to give a few things back to science. As such, even if it might look like a game at a first glance, and it actually is in technical terms, you are actually contributing to solving a massive problem in Biology, which deals with protein folding and the computers that are actively working on solving it.

In essence, proteins to this neat trick where they fold into specific shapes, in order to properly interact with particular atoms and elements. However, given their rather complex shapes and intricacies, proteins can basically fold in a huge number of ways, which makes predicting their behavior incredibly difficult. Rather than let computers work at it alone, scientists call for your help as well, since you’ll be indirectly contributing to the algorithms governing the computers that tackle these problems.

The actual gameplay is actually quite straightforward, since all you need is a mouse and a very clear head, because things can quickly get out of hand if you lose focus. As such, you must drag the protein around, wiggle it about, and use bands to join some of its ends in order to come up with a specific shape, which has to account for a few requirements. Luck has nothing to do with it, but you sometimes feel like you need a push in the right direction to figure things out.

As far as the visual aspect is concerned, don’t expect anything too great because the game is not on par with Grand Theft Auto when it comes to the agenda it's pushing. Even so, the graphics are not exactly bad, because they manage to get the point across quite clearly, even if you’ve never seen or heard of an amino acid before. Certainly, the screen might get a bit cluttered when you reach the more complicated puzzles, but that’s to be expected.

No one is disputing the fact that computers can do a lot of operations in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do the same, but they are not as practical when it comes to solving things using original ideas. Hence, Foldit is indeed an elegant and laudable attempt at making everyone actively contribute to curing awful diseases and solving scientific dilemmas.