If we are continuing to have handbuild only puzzles, there are a few functions that would be good to have added to the GUI script capabilities.
In particular, mutate would be a good candidate for adding.
Have some others you would like? Add below!
I like your idea. Rebuilt would also be helpful.
Looping is also an absolute necessity.
I cannot spare the luxury in this day and age where people fear for their paid jobs to sit at my pc and restart a banding script over and over again by pushing a button.
The whole notion of being forced to continuously handfold is odd given that, within a limited timeframe, scripts yield better scores to begin with. If handfolding yields better scores for those for whom handfolding works, they will use handfolding even when scripts are available. I use handfolding usually only in the beginning to position things and then let the pc do the tedious work while I earn the money to pay the bills.
Better yet, just disable wiggle and shake for the Lua scripts, so tooling scripts can be used. (Making bands, getting information ….)
I disagree with Timo here, wiggle and shake are needed to stabilize the protein after many actions including banding, rebuilding or mutating.
So is there anything you consider not to be an absolute necessity?
Scripts yield better scores, but I gather from feedback elsewhere that they do not yield better solutions. So I understand the desire to alter something (as much as I loathe how it's being done).
In any case, whether you do the tedious work by pushing a button over and over again, or by running a long lasting script, it is really a waste of your time. If the virtue of foldit is handfolding, we should submit our handfolded positions to some server that would do the tedious work for us (for instance, by sending it back to our CPU, distributed computing in folding@home style).
Disabling wiggle and shake would make some sense to me, but only if it is also disabled in GUI recipes. If blue fuze is considered handfolding, it doesn't matter how it's programmed. Perhaps a limit on the number of wiggly iterations is in order. Other ideas in http://fold.it/portal/node/994243
Other exampless: after tweaking and pulling, QuickFix irons out the backbone without really changing anything (at least before it starts rebuilding); so that is not handfolding? A handfolding tool like mutate is a complex, magical algorithm (or maybe I'm just naive and it just wastes a lot of time, just like wiggling does when everything is frozen); but QuickMutate, which automates the simple, understandable job of trying to substitute one sidechain at a time, is forbidden. Setting the strength of the latest band added higher than 1.5 is possible using a GUI recipe, but extremely clumsly compared to a LUAv2 one liner.
It all seems quite insane to me. Maybe there is an explanation, but it seems us lab rats are not supposed to know why these things are decided.
truestone, what part seems insane to you?
The idea behind hand-folding only puzzles is to see if we can get more diversity in solutions by delaying when scripts are used. We sometimes see that many different folders will arrive at very similar solutions because the scripts they use are similar and they converge on basically the same result.
"hand-folding" is a kind of wishy-washy term with no absolute definition. We allowed GUI scripts because they don't have all of the power of branching, loops, etc. The GUI scripts were never designed to be synonymous with "hand-folding", but they did seem to line up with the term fairly nicely. There are definitely some oddities about it, but in general we think GUI scripts complement "hand-folding" fairly nicely.
As we release more and more hand-folding rounds, the scientists are evaluating to see if these are useful compared to previous puzzles where there was no such thing as hand-folding only. If you want to know more, you could ask in the next scientist chat about it.
The new people here don't have the benefit of having played the game when there was no recipes, or with just the GUI recipes. The original GUIs pretty much only automated the end-stage process of manually walking the backbone doing local wiggles. I saved many of those, and they are pretty crude compared to what the LUA recipes do.
It sounds like the project wants to get back to those days of real hand folding, so trying to get GUI recipes to have all or most of the features of the LUA recipes is counter to the purpose.
I've added mutate all, mutate to specific residue, and rebuild to the list of available actions in GUI scripts. These should go out in the next release.
As for what Angus said, that is basically true. We don't want GUI and LUA scripts to have the same power with just a different interface. This is one of the reasons we won't be adding control flow (like condition statements or loops) any time soon for GUI scripts.