《科学美国人》评出2010年改变世界的十大创意和技术——科学小游戏

原作者：
来源Human Number Crunchers
译者saintson

Computing

计算

Human Number Crunchers

人类数字计算机

When research is like a video game, computers finish second by John Pavlus

研究如电子游戏时，计算机永不及人——约翰·帕夫卢斯

for years the conventional wisdom on the relative cognitive strengths of humans and machines has held that humans excel at recognizing faces and other kinds of pattern matching, while computers rule on anything that smacks of number crunching. That may no longer be the case. The success of Foldit—an online puzzle created by biologists and computer scientists at the University of Washington—proves that human intuition can outperform computer algorithms on complex scientific problems

长期以来，传统观念认为，人类与计算机在认知方面各有所长：人类比机器更擅长面孔识别以及其他类型的模式匹配，而计算机在涉及数字运算的方面更胜一筹。这不会永成不变。美国华盛顿大学的生物学家和计算机方面的科学家制作了一个在线小游戏——“蛋白质折叠”，该游戏的成功证明，在复杂的科学问题上，人类直觉优于计算机算法。

Foldit presents players (all nonscientists) with a partially folded protein onscreen and challenges them to twist it into an ideal shape based on simple rules. Not only did players predict correct protein structures much more quickly than any algorithm could (a brute-force search of all the possibilities would take millions of years), they were also able to intuit solutions that a computer might never have found at all. “To fold a protein into the right shape, you might first have to bend it in a couple of directions that seem totally wrong,” says Seth Cooper, a Washington computer scientist and one of Foldit’s inventors. “A human being playing with a virtual object can see the big picture and recognize those tricky solutions.

该游戏在屏幕上向玩家（全都不是科学家）呈现部分折叠的蛋白质，让他们根据一些简单的规则，把蛋白质扭曲成理想的形状。玩家不只比计算机更快地预测出正确蛋白质结构（计算机算法用“暴力破解法”找出所有可能要会花数百万年的时间），还能凭直觉解决计算机或许永远解决不了的问题。华盛顿大学计算机方面的科学家、该游戏的发明者之一赛斯·库珀说：“为了将蛋白质折叠成正确的形状，首先你可能需要在看似完全错误的几个方向进行弯曲。人类在玩虚拟游戏时能够看清全貌，并且认识到那些巧妙的解决方案。”

At the university’s Center for Game Science, Cooper and his colleagues are now developing a new wave of games to accelerate the pace of research in bioinformatics, drug discovery and even nanoengineering. “Right now there are only 15 people in the world who know how to design a molecular machine out of DNA,” says Washington computer scientist Zoran Popovi′c. “These games could increase that number by two orders of magnitude—we’d have thousands of people making new discoveries.” Could a gamer one day share a Nobel Prize? Says Cooper,“That’s our greatest hope.”

在华盛顿大学的游戏科学研究中心，库珀和他的同事正在开发一系列新游戏，以加快生物信息学、药物开发甚至纳米工程等方面研究的步伐。华盛顿大学计算机方面的科学家佐兰·波波维奇说：“现在世界上只有15 个人知道如何从DNA 中设计出一台分子机器。这些游戏可以使这一数字提高两个数量级，会有数以千计的人做出新的发现。”游戏玩家会不会也有获得诺贝尔奖的那一天？库珀说。“我们最大的期望就是有那么一天，”

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