Video Gaming... FOR SCIENCE!

[Duke87 1,070]

Linkedy-link-da-link

And they say video games are nothing but a waste of time.

[Follarch 326]

That is actually really amazing. Gamers helped create a breakthrough in ten days that Biochemists were trying to do for a decade.

See what happens when the general public is more involved in things? Important matters get accomplished a lot quicker. Now if only the Government took that into account...

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I love the University of Washington! They make all these wonderful things, like this!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I love the University of Washington! They make all these wonderful things, like this!

I think I posted this in the science stuff thread, but anyway, the University of Washington is also the home of the GNU software project.

[Keder 116]

Yay for them, and thats really impresive.

[airman15 4,111]

What many overlook is that a large portion of games created can have an underlying educational factor. If you take a game like Chess, one would perceive it as a board game that can go for hours when it was also used to teach generals battle strategies at the time of its creation. Or if you look at most first person shooters they may teach the player hazards to watch out for or maybe which weapons are effective against what.

Can't always judge a book by its cover- you really have to look deep before jumping to conclusions.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

To add to the compendium of battle/strategy/tactics game, how about the ancient Chinese game of Go. Learn in 10 minutes, never become a master in your lifetime.

The idea of using the net with laymen to do some forms of research is something that I hope will catch on more. It is an incredible resource, the mind of man. You don't have to have several arcane qualifications to take part in some projects.

"If you sit by a river long enough, the bodies of your enemy will float by."

The Art of War

[hym 358]

The idea of using the net with laymen to do some forms of research is something that I hope will catch on more. It is an incredible resource, the mind of man.

There are several technical challenges that we really need to solve before we start get serious about employing the vast computing power of the internet.

• Network speeds vary greatly, along with other key quality factors. Until your software can reliably control for these realities, you have no business even attempting to build a distributed computing project.
  
• We desperately need to improve our processor utilization. The latest Cray computer can scale up to 1 million CPU's, but even with the most demanding applications, the typical supercomputer utilizes maybe only 10% of its cores to work on the project. No one has come anywhere close to a model of distributed computing that allows us to achieve full processor utilization on a single project.
  
• We need smarter AI's to make the process of large-scale "crowdsourcing" feasible for the average research team. Even with the tools that Cray provides to help research teams set up their research for time on a supercomputer, they can spend more time prepping the experiment for the supercomputer than it took to get the experiment ready in the first place. Realistically, the only way to make this kind of processing power feasible for the average research team is to develop AI's that are literally several quantum leaps above what the most advanced neural network and genetic algorithm AI's of today are capable of achieving. Unfortunately, it is estimated that less than 100 people in the world are truly experts in these types of AI's, and even teams of these people can spend years developing an AI only to find it's no smarter than an something they could have developed in an afternoon. Additionally, we need these AI's to be more robust, too; genetic algorithms need to be able to fix themselves in the event that they trap themselves into a localized solution (as opposed to the global solution) and neural networks need a means to protect themselves against sucking in bad data and undergoing "catastrophic unlearning."
  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

^ This is a brand of nay-saying that I have heard for years from programmers and other technical people who would never have gotten the Wright's first airplane off the ground. If we wait until everything is perfect, nothing will ever get done.

In an imperfect world, empiricism is often the best approach.

[hym 358]

^ This is a brand of nay-saying that I have heard for years from programmers and other technical people who would never have gotten the Wright's first airplane off the ground. If we wait until everything is perfect, nothing will ever get done.

In an imperfect world, empiricism is often the best approach.

No one is suggesting that we wait till it is perfect. What I, and others, am saying is that we have very significant problems that are preventing real utilization of these kinds of crowdsourcing projects. It's like sending humans to Mars without a practical life support system; it may be possible, but it is very difficult, and no matter how hard you try, you won't get anywhere near the benefits out of the trip that you could be getting if you paid some attention to developing a more practical life support system.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

^ This is a brand of nay-saying that I have heard for years from programmers and other technical people who would never have gotten the Wright's first airplane off the ground. If we wait until everything is perfect, nothing will ever get done.

In an imperfect world, empiricism is often the best approach.

No one is suggesting that we wait till it is perfect. What I, and others, am saying is that we have very significant problems that are preventing real utilization of these kinds of crowdsourcing projects. It's like sending humans to Mars without a practical life support system; it may be possible, but it is very difficult, and no matter how hard you try, you won't get anywhere near the benefits out of the trip that you could be getting if you paid some attention to developing a more practical life support system.

Well, there are always difficulties when the universe of discourse is extremely large. That is why statisticians developed the concept of confidence level. However, man is the beast that rushes in where angels fear to tread.

"The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer"

War-time motto of the Construction Battalions.