"Serious Games"- Playing for Research | Shift

In their work, more and more scientists use internet surfers do acquire data. With the help of online games, they get people to play along, helping the scientists to solve riddles large and small about humanity.One sensational"serious games" success was the biology game"Foldit"in 2011. Conceived at the University of Washington, it allows researchers to figure out in days what they'd failed to do for years - they decoded the structure of a protein, in an important step in the study of HIV-AIDS."Galaxy Zoo"is another example. Researchers at Oxford wanted to classify about a million galaxies according to structure, form, shape, color and size. Computers are unsuitable for such a task because they are poor at recognizing patterns. So the researchers made a game of it, and several hundred thousand people accomplished the task. And the Finnish national archive in Helsinki is asking internet users to decode letters used in old newspapers.