Can we remove All_Hands Scores?
It is a relic. Thing of the past.
The year 2012 is for computer power, as you can see with the new recruits.
Four Core, Six core, 8 core computers on line.
Teaching new comers molecular biology is futile.
They want to play games and level up.
How many hundreds give up each day?
Because we force them to move side chains, tweak coil and sheets…
We have LUA, and programmers make it easy for new comers.
And programmers make more good programs each day.
Why pull side chains? why manually do re-structure? Why do mutate manually?
Why shake? Why wiggle?…..all is automated now…..
We have to revise the tutorial it discourages everyone.
Teach them Recipes.
Combining recipes, when to stop a recipe and start another one,
Use recipes that are useful..midgame, end game…
These are still human intuition that computers can not do.
Rav3n and Tlaloc you are heroes!
But to force players to be like us! Hand making? Learn Molecular biology?
Just to enter the game? ….
Then we are not helping foldit.
We just become a bureaucratic force, to protect our ranks.
The ideal situation is to make new comers to play a game like pacman and
at the same time curing cancer.
Let us use the resource they are giving.
Human intuition and computer power.
Jak
kxu, can you remove the All-Hands scoreboard from the website: http://fold.it/portal/players/a_all
hand folders are still ranked higher than "script only" players…..think about it
Just out of curiosity, I conducted a quick investigation of the top 25 players of the current soloist ranking. It turns out that all but two of them have the "Perpetual Moving Machine" (1 million moves) achievement. (The two that don't happen to be frood66, who joined in September 2011 and has 937k moves, and me, who only accumulated 865k moves despite having played for almost three years because I mostly fold manually and only use relatively simple scripts). So, you could legitimately argue that extensive usage of complex scripts does provide an advantage over most other players.
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That being said, script usage alone isn't enough for continued success in protein folding for the following reasons:
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All things being equal, those with better hardware would have an advantage because the same script would run faster.
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Even having the best hardware one can afford isn't enough, because the player needs to learn when to use a certain script.
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Because of the computational complexity involved in representing the biochemistry of proteins digitally, brute-force approaches become much less attractive for longer proteins.
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Scripts are essentially a form of AI, which are only as good as their design. They are the most effective when used to conduct repeatable protocols, but less useful when it comes to judgment calls related to human intuition.
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Even if a player can get points #1 through #4 perfectly, there is still a chance that you could run a script overnight and gain zero points. From the viewpoint of cost-effectiveness (relative to carbon output and the opportunity cost of your time), the best strategy would involve a mix of script usage and manual folding.
I agree with infjamc's analysis, and have two other points to offer…
First - all of the current scripts were adapted from manual moves…. In other words - someone, either the scriptwriter or the person who gave the scriptwriter the idea, had to find out from manual moves what might work.
Second - there are still many things that you can do to a protein that even in lua 2, cannot be scripted.
No hand work, scripts only is FAIL.
There HAVE to be at least some manual thing/s prior sets/s of script/s
I'm relatively new and have had success using the recipes. However, there have been times when my highest scores resulted from hand work done somewhere in the start, middle or end of the process. There seems to be a bit of luck involved. I'd hate to see the all hands option disappear.
As a matter of fact, I'd like to try some all hands puzzles now that I've played around here for about 5 months. I'm convinced that those understanding the manual manipulation process will generally outdue those using recipes exclusively. The exceptions being the programmers themselves. I think they have a better handle on which recipe to use where.
Both manual and recipes are needed here. Everyone just has their own style of playing and some simply don't have the patience.
Where does one even find the all hands puzzles to play? I've been wondering where those scores are coming from when I see them in someones profile. I don't think the option is obvious enough.
sorry for the confusion smilingone…
jakbinimbol basically put 2 unrelated feedbacks into one.
All Hands was a puzzle type where we would pick top Foldit solutions from previous puzzles and post it as a "All Hands on Deck" puzzle where everyone had access to them and as players improved on them, the new top scoring solutions would replace the old ones. So it was basically continually sharing top solutions (essentially everyone was in the same Foldit Team).
Unfortunately, what would happen is that the top solutions would all converge to the top-scoring ones and it would end up with less diversification than we started with.
This is why with the recent "Top CASP ROLL R000X Predictions" puzzles we've tried to give you previous states of top-scoring solutions (I believe this was suggested by Pletsch as a new way to bring back All Hands puzzles: starting from middle-scoring solutions instead of top-scoring ones).
Anyway, as you can see we haven't posted an All Hands puzzle in a long time (the Exploration Puzzles were an attempt to get around this convergence problem) and infjamc already mentioned getting rid of those obsolete scores: http://fold.it/portal/node/991790#comment-15647
As for the tutorial levels, there is no plan to dramatically change these and they were recently restructured last fall (although we could add some recipe/lua tutorials).
I have the general sense that scripts are often run too early in a puzzle. It's all too easy to fire off a script last thing at night or when leaving for the day with the feeling "What's the worst that can happen?" , but the end result is often premature optimization of a bad solution. It seems really important first to get a good structure which scripts can refine later: it's all about finding the right balance.
I'd be intrigued to see the results of a puzzle with 2 rounds: no scripts allowed on the first round and anything goes on the second.
I don't know why this has -3 votes. Players shouldbe able to know how to use all recources, and properly, at least to an extent. I don't script myself because I haven't been taught, and the wiki tutorials don't give me what I need. There should be something on it in the game itself. Hand folding may work well, but everyone should have the same chance. If the tool is there, people shouldn't have to stumble through it. They should be taught all the different thing they can do. Strategy tutorials might be interesting, showing user info like that is on the wiki, and this would inprove their folding. This is the whole point of folding! Doing as good as we can and always inproving. So if there is something to help, it shouldn't be kept back for those who can find the right info. Everything should be readily available. We want to have everyone at the top of their game.
