Speed Folding -- Suggesting New Puzzle Type

[phi16]

Normal puzzles such as Denovo, Exploration and Mutate are played with a time limit. As soon as play begins, a countdown timer starts counting down to the allowed time limit. Puzzles may be played over and over. Players find winning strategies through use of the most efficient, economical and fastest pathways to the highest score.

Collective intelligence will guide players as they search for more economical, efficient scripts and better, manual work. Just as speed chess exercises the chess player's ability to see the bird's eye view and a rearview mirror, timed fold.it games will help players and teams to streamline their work and focus on essentials.

For example, teams now share info on which scripts they are using. Out of that comes a recommendation of four or five scripts to be run for each game for best results. However, the first script may have had to run for eight hours. The second script only worked for the first half, most found the third script useless and the fourth script produced only two points. Much effort is wasted trying to reproduce these recommendations. With a time limit, players will focus more on results within a time frame. Players may discover what proportions of shaking the backbone and wiggling the sidechains really makes a difference in any particular situation.

Typical play goes something like this:

0-5000 - score during the initial shake down period (5000)
5000 - 8500 - score during initial rebuilding, remodeling phase (3500)
8500 - 10500 - score during relaxing, getting the kinks out phase (2000)
10500 - 11500 - compression, wiggle/shake (1000)
11500 - 12000 - sidechain work, walking (500)
12000 - 12100 - final walk (100)

Why spend any time at all on the last phase, worth 100 points, if so much more can be achieved in the initial phases? A timed play would encourage more of this type of thinking and stress the importance of good beginnings. Of course, at some point, each phase maxes out and its time for the next bit of business. But we have learned that these sections should each be done in their correct proportions.

I personally recommend a 4 hour game. But there are good arguments for playing longer and shorter games. Currently, we are playing 7 day games which are wasteful and don't encourage this type of strategizing.

After a puzzle has been played, players examine results and discuss how their play may be improved. Improved play will come in the form of different order of played scripts, different manual operations and revised scripts.

[Mike Cassidy]

I like this.

[tokens]

If this is implemented it should take into account that people start on a puzzle at different times of the day. One idea might be to have the timer reset each time the puzzle is reset. Of course that might change things a bit. Then people will have all the time they want to find out what changes of topology work in the beginning. And it will become more about finding the optimal order to do moves/scripts in.

One downside to your suggestion is that it might make a difference how fast a computer you have.

[mottiger]

i don't like to be stressed in anything i'm doing. so i wouldn't like this new type of puzzle.
I think we don't have enough time to discover new routes. I have to decide quite early which of my solutions i want to develop further and all the others i had will be lost. and i don't think that with a really short time limit people are gonna be better folders. the experienced people know what to do and will rock these puzzles and the unexperienced onces will be lost and they cannot even improve because they have no time to figure out where their problem was.

[spmm]

4 hours is really not a lot of time for a denovo - particularly a large one - this may also increase people in groups just copying the first high solution - I think we all try to become faster more efficient folders anyway.
Discussion afterwards - is this in a group or globally? If globally the best solutions should also be available - to interact with for every folder - you can learn a lot by interacting with a good fold.

I don't really understand what you mean by wasteful.
Perhaps you could try it in a large team like AD and see how it goes.

[beta_helix]

We have discussed this many times and the problem of different computer speeds always comes up.
There is simply no fair way of doing this when people have very different computers.

An alternative would be to allow a maximum number of moves:

The puzzle would be up for a few days (or as long as usual) but you'd only be allowed to perform a fixed set of moves. Once you hit that number you wouldn't be able to do anything else (or your score would no longer count, like the conditions).

If you reset the puzzle, you would get that same number of moves to try again.

This idea is another form of Exploration: you search one area of conformational space, then when you run out of moves you can try searching the same area (using less moves) but eventually you'd have to search a different region of space.

There would be a few details to work out (as it would surely limit the number of recipe moves) but it might be interesting.

[infjamc]

Would it be possible to recycle some of the aspects of the "duel" feature from earlier versions for this? After all, a duel puzzle is essentially a simple form of this (with 20 moves).

[tealight]

Different computer speeds, different time zones, would make the idea beneficial to only a few players.
The rest wouldnt stand a chance.

Beta's idea of maximum number of moves would give a more level "playing field", it would almost be reminiscent of Chess.

[Rav3n_pl]

Cool idea.
It should be doable this way:

1. Puzzle posted for 4-7 days
2. Time when we can work on it: 4hrs
3. Puzzle CAN NOT be play offline
4. Game time counted: we play one hour - one hour counted, we can quit and continue next day

This way no time zone or "cant play 4hrs in row" problem will not affect anyone.

Maybe multi start puzzle, each start has separate time count.

[brow42]

I would prefer not to see scripts used at all. One can easily do a blue fuze by hand, but a script that samples 10 rebuilds and evaluates them all is vastly more powerful than a human simply because of all the bookkeeping (and humans only have 3 quicksaves).