I just started digging into foldit (no science background, just doing it in hopes of helping scientists discover something new). I was wondering if we (humans) can still make an impact given how much AI has advanced the past couple of years. Should I continue learning foldit and trying to help out?
Thanks,
Andy
Yes. Foldit is still actively being used by scientists to make new discoveries. The currently active science puzzles (aside from the revisiting puzzle) are generally of two types.
The first is the electron-density puzzles, which are attempting to fix up issues which other scientists have inadvertently left in the experimentally determined structures. Successful results here are posted to PDB-Redo, a well-recognized site which collects such improved structures.
The second type of puzzle currently being used by scientists are the small molecule design puzzles. In these puzzles we're asking Foldit players to come up with interesting new molecules which bind to particular protein targets. These compounds will then be given to experimental collaborators to test in their existing drug-discovery pipelines.
While those are the current set of active puzzles, it's quite possible that we'll have other puzzle types in the future. But this all depends on the collaborators we're able to get, because we do want to make sure that your efforts have a reasonable chance to be tested by scientific researchers.