Playing for Science

This is being re-posted from my microblog, Tumbld Thoughts.

Here is an interesting article from "The Scientist" called "Games for Science". It features a number of games designed for massively parallel data analysis [1]. The idea is to distribute data to personal computers, perform operations there, and them re-assemble the analyzed data at its source. Two projects are EteRNA (RNA structural design) and Phylo (multiple sequence alignments).

[1] one example is BOINC (admined at UC-Berkeley). An example of distributed computing.