There are really two types of "cheating": one good, and one bad. If a player "cheats" by finding a very quick and easy way to get a scientifically valid solution (a folded protein structure, or a good protein sequence that will fold into a desired structure), then that's terrific – and that's not really cheating. It's exactly what we want to encourage. Insofar as looking at the code will help that, yes, there's no reason to prevent players from looking at (though not changing) the code; security through obscurity isn't necessary. And yes, it would be great for players to have a way of coding algorithms that can serve as shortcuts – but players already have that, in the form of the Lua scripts that you can write, share, modify, and so forth.
The other type of "cheating", though, is exploiting imperfections in the scoring function in order to come up with easy ways to produce structures that score well, but are scientifically meaningless (e.g. the "forests" of surface-exposed tryptophan residues that Foldit and Rosetta designs often used to have before we figured out ways to penalize that). Even this is not malicious cheating – indeed, when players do this, it helps us to identify the flaws in our scoring function and to fix these. The problem is that we can only improve the scientific validity of the scoring function and the game by having players respond to it without being able to change it. If players had control over the game engine and the scoring function, the natural tendency would be to create more scoring artifacts that could be exploited to produce high-scoring (albeit meaningless) structures. We would inevitably move towards scientifically meaningless results – again, without any malice whatsoever on players' parts – since players have no means at their disposal for assessing the scientific validity of the changes that they introduce (something that requires a wet lab).
I do agree. But why not let players work, then YOU go in and actually make the changes? Or maybe even let players create tools, and not touch the scoring function Cough Pins Cough? And if that causes issues, UW changes what they need to change. It would still mean more things getting out the door, and Foldit isn't trashed with scientifically bad code.
Obscurity is never a security feature. Why don't you allow us to fix your mistakes?
Please release the source code! The interface is amazing and could help other projects…
Hi there,
Yes, I have not played the game.
Just came here to say I love the idea. Got you a great paper in Nature!
As a software engineer, you really need to collaborate with the open source community.
There are plenty of things you probably don't know that will help you greatly building this game (and others) and free resources as well (I'm thinking about bitbucket, github, circleci, travisci, …).
If you are scared to be accepting proteins that have been wrongly ranked by a bogus function, then don't trust scoring from clients. Just add a validation pass that you run yourselves (or gently ask Folding@HOME if they'd be ok with lending you guys some computing power to run this).
Scientific Discovery Games appears to have received grants from multiple US departments, I don't see why at least certain parts of the source code shouldn't be accessible to at least the American tax payer.
I don't know what your goal is with this (DARPA stuff? making millions?) I just see this labeled as research and think OMG this is a terrific idea now how does this help science, health, humanity?…
Please make it open. Find the LICENSE that suits you but at least allow non-commercial derivatives.
could be interessant add modern and quark physics to the program
My thoughts:
I don't care about the scoring and cheating b.s. In the end, we're trying to cure diseases.
Open source would give the opportunity for computer tweakers to fix performance bugs or compile the app with optimizations specific to their chipset. Maybe add openCL/CUDA compatibility to leverage our expensive GPUs. And by "our" it would be for everyone's benefits to have optimized builds.
The opportunity cost here is monumental. What's holding you up?
