@tamirh Thank you for posting. What baffles me is that the label "hand folding" bans familiar tools that are only there to help you apply your creativity to the solution (to add to those mentioned before: zero length bands, brow's manual rebuild, simply reporting how many cysteines are around, dialogues to work around the horrific builtin sliders http://fold.it/portal/node/994443). Tools unable to get your score up on their own. If there is no better definition of hand folding, I choose to call these tools hand folding tools. "Hand folding" puzzles make hand folding more difficult. If I understand what the reasons are, it's like completely rejecting technical innovation, without any discussion, instead of working to make it better.
@Angus I don't quite agree there. Everyone starts off learning the concepts and basic tools, without having a clue what that cookbook sidebar is for. It takes a while before you start using or writing recipes. It takes a while before you realize how powerful some of these many recipes are. It took me a long while to realize and accept that you can't get a high score without almost mindlessly running such recipes (on a lucky or perhaps somewhat insightful starting position). If only we had a kind of puzzle actually promoting hand work…
Rebuild should be added.
And there should be always one hand-folding puzzle online and add a new categorie for ranking.
And the recipes should be sorted by "GUI" and "Lua". Would be easier for newbies to find the gui ones.
And sharing should be allowed, maybe without loading as a guide. And…ok thats enough for this time.
Upps, will be fine if all wishes come true before saying them. ;-)))
But without wiggle and shake in LUA you can still get the benefits of a whole class of usefull scripts without having to do stupid work like making lots of equidistant bands by hand. But complicated control sequences will have no purpose (except maybe in the case of mutate and rebuild to pick the best).
In my opinion, gui scripts are not useful in hand folding.
You can fold a protein without loops of random actions and complex set of bands.
For me, if you allow random rebuild in loop, you destroy all the meaning of hand folding puzzles.
Rebuild by hand, banding only the part you want is a way to learn how to fold protein. Hand folding is a part of the set of competences useful to Foldit, players who are good in this activities should have a reward by hand folding puzzles.
Players who don't like to hand fold, have the choice to skip these puzzles and wait to the next step, they will have other rewards.
I agree with marie_s on this. I don't think rebuild belongs in GUI recipes, this is something that should be done by hand. I've gotten lazy with the LUA recipes, rarely doing any good hand folding, and letting the scripts do the work. I rather enjoyed making a decent solution on one of the new hand fold puzzles last night, the old skills came back after a bit of practice and I made something better than an automated de novo recipe might have done.
Banding, pulling, rebuilding selected segments by hand are what makes it hand folding. Automating that last point or two with walking recipes is not going to make a great solution, it only slightly improves what you have created without spending all night manually doing local wiggles between frozen segments. I've done that, it's boring and tedious.
The great solution is going to come from the hand work.
The last sentence would be true if handfolding was a totally seperate category. I hate handfolding but am forced to play it in order to keep my category scores up.
I understand the points above - they are objective in my view whether from Truestone or Marie. Pro hand folding or pro script are but two sides of the same coin. But I wonder if the question now is not somewhat deeper. Timo touches on this I think.
It seems that puzzles now have a far broader spectrum than they once did - no prob there. But make me a newbie and give me 690 etc and the fun element really is not high. Overall, 'Foldit' appears to be less of a game today.
Perhaps it is time to separate these facets.
No fun could mean fewer newbies becoming regulars. But once a newbie becomes a regular they might like to try the slower (perhaps more cerebral) stuff. The current scoring would have to be changed - and we have two systems working already.
Just a thought.
Can we wait a little more before spoiling the hand folding puzzles with automatic rebuilds and mutate?
I am afraid that the players than don't like them will not play them anyway and the players who like them will lack a real fun.
The purpose of hand folding is to choose your actions not to let choose the luck.
Thanks marie_s, we'll be meeting on this and discussing exactly what GUI scripts should support.
