zoran Lv 1
We have reached the final stages of our study of the effectiveness of human reasoning on the structure prediction problems. This final stage, as it turns out, will also be critical to some of our findings. Let me briefly explain what we have found so far. On well-structured localized problems foldit players do very well. On more complex problems players also do well, but it often happens that different groups or players get different parts of the protein right. Naturally, the all-hands mode becomes crucial as the key tool for combining the individual discoveries and solutions into the best solution produced by the collective "meta-brain" of foldit players. The original all-hands methodology had at least two key problems:
<ol><li>the unique solutions quckly got swamped by the singular concensus solution (that is improved by an astounding amount, but still may not have contained some good parts of other solutions),</li><li>there was no clear way to compare sectional goodness of different solutions</li><li>there was no easy way to transfer/incorporate only the portion of the whole structure. </li></ol>We have addressed these two problems in the recent release, with the following changes:
<ol><li>We changed the way we cluster the candidate solutions. Now the unique well performing solutions should not be removed from the pool of good candidates. Good solutions that are very similiar to others will no longer be present.
</li><li>When viewing other solutions as ghost, their transparency and the coloring scheme points to the specific locations where the ghost solution is better, suggesting the potential partial replacements.
</li><li>with the new "copy the secondary sctructure" action you can transer portions of the proteins, and proceed with adjustments and cleanups to produce a better merged solution.</li></ol>The subsequent all-hands Grand Challenges will be particularly exciting to us, and we hope that they can showcase the power of the collective mind to a much greater extent. As these challenges complete, we will be busily preparing the paper to Nature reporting the ways in which a game can do better than any currently known method for structure prediction.