Big University Competition Next Month

Started by zoran

zoran Lv 1

We have an exciting new opportunity to issue a first college protein folding challenge. Recently a sponsor (Medimmune) has contacted us with the idea of sponsoring the competition amongst university students for the best protein folding university team. The idea is to promote the excitement of problem solving in biochemistry and draw more college students into this exciting scientific pursuit. We have identified a protein with unknown structure suitable for the competition, and our sponsor has secured real monetary prizes for the winning university groups. Medimmune is of course unaware of what protein we've chosen, and will in no way benefit from the folding of this protein. They are mainly interested in sponsoring a new exciting way of doing science.

This is the first time we have done something like this, and based on how it goes we will consider having more of these competitions in the future. There are two potential issues that concern me, but after thinking about it for a while, we concluded that we should see how this competition goes and move on from there:

  1. Because the competition is restricted to university students, it is by nature going to exclude non-students. I don't like this, but I think it is worth trying because it may level the playing field a bit. If it was open to all, it would be harder for new students groups to enter to competition with hopes of winning.

  2. The monetary prizes for winners will be considerable. Although it is just one puzzle, this is a marked difference from purely voluntary power folding we've created in this game for the past 2 years. This definitely does NOT mean that we've moved to a "folding for cash" model. As Foldit becomes more well known in scientific and public circles, we have more and more people interested to sponsor different kinds of effort within Foldit. Some things make more sense than others. This time we decided to go for it and see if there is a difference in folding play and outcomes compared to the voluntary game play folding. Optimizing for the incentive structure within Foldit is one of the open research questions we are investigating. One thing I want to make absolutely clear, is that the outcomes of Foldit in this competition as well as anything and everything else we pose as a puzzle in the past and future will always be in the public domain. I see this as a founding principle of the democratized scientific pursuit we're creating here, and we will never deviate from this.

In summary, this is all new for all of us, we'll see how it goes. post your thoughts/comments below, as always.

Zoran

zoran Lv 1

each university will have their own group. if we had non-students involved as a separate group, the competition would be dominated by non-student veterans of the game who would surely win. the idea of this competition is to primarily draw greater student involvement in foldit.

davidla Lv 1

i think students like myself would be excited this. given that there's an award for the winning university group, is there a size limit for each of the university groups?

Madde Lv 1

Why not two different competitions with the same protein at the same time? One for university groups fighting for monetary prizes and one for non-students playing for love.

Deleted user

Because they could use the solutions from the non-student puzzle that all the "veterans" are working on to gain an advantage on the student puzzle?

jhullaert Lv 1

That's really $*!@& !!!!

I thought foldit wanted to be international? What does medimmune win when there are no other universities involved? I hope someone can explain me why.

I'm really disappointed.

zoran Lv 1

yes, unfortunately this is true. Of course Foldit team wanted world-wide competition, but because Medimmune actually distributes the awards, and because these are foreign payments with tax implications and who knows what else the official rules need to be explicitly spelled out and approved in order to be legally valid for each country. Medimmune hired a firm to explicitly formulate the terms of the competition, and they could only get the legal process completed in US and UK. We definitely don't like this aspect of it, but it's our first try at something like this. If it goes well and is generally well received we'll make sure that subsequent competition are open to both the world and non-students.