The work of UW CSE Ph.D. alum Adrien Treuille, now on the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, is described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“A Web-based game that uses the brainpower of biology novices to understand molecules key to life and disease is producing working designs of those molecules …”
The game, EteRNA, is a derivative of Adrien’s UW Ph.D. work on Foldit, a Web-based game for protein folding and protein structure calculation, which originated this sort of “crowd-sourced science” and revealed the perhaps surprising fact that teenage gamers can beat the pants off of trained biochemists.
Read the article here.