Healthbolt mentioned this, and now this little article:

A research team at the University of Washington has created a video game called Foldit, which challenges dexterous gamers to fold protein strands according to the actual laws of physics—thereby helping to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that could mean cures for diseases from Alzheimer’s to HIV.

The game, developed by a group of biochemists, computer scientists, and engineers, resembles an elaborate form of Tetris. It uses the same protein-folding software as the Rosetta@home project, which was created in 2005—also by U. of Washington researchers—as an effort to use volunteers to calculate every possible protein shape in the human body—a task so enormous that if every computer in the world was working on it simultaneously, it would still take centuries to complete. But while the Rosetta project asks participants to donate only their unused computer power, Foldit takes advantage of the “natural 3-D problem-solving skills” of all those masterful X Box players out there.

So far, around 1,000 players have tested the system, though it formally opened to the public last week. Interested in having a go? Just click here. Though novices beware—you’re liable to get a thumping by haptagud, daemonk, mincus, thuza, and Spontan, all of whom are probably 13-year-old boys.

Somehow I am reminded of the title of an early LP record. When LP (12″ vinyl) records first came out, one popular category was instruction—not just languages, but just about everything. Someone came up with a sure-fire hit title: “Bowl Your Way To Better French Through Civil-War Birdcalls.”

But playing a computer game for science is real and sounds pretty cool. The game is called Foldit, and Healthbolt has the story and the source.

A good site if you like challenges. The opening paragraph:

Kadon Enterprises, Inc., welcomes you to our online gallery of 233 games and puzzles you can see and purchase here. Enchanting original playthings in lasercut acrylic and handcrafted wood, for minds of all ages. So beautiful, they’re art.

• Click on the gamepuzzles title above for a quick introduction.
• For a surprising animation, click on our yellow W logo above.
• You can take a full-circle tour of the entire gamepuzzles gallery. Click Grand Tour to begin. Scroll through or click NEXT buttons, and at each section bottom click on playful portals (in red) to enter the next section. See everything in one loop.
• To visit individual sections in any order, click on Gallery Showroom at left.

UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) took an interesting route. They decided to focus their intercollegiate competition on chess. So they recruited chess masters as coaches, recruited high school chess players, and have cut a wide swath in the chess world. (If only some college would take the same approach to Go!) Above, UMBC students play during the school’s chess team pep rally, which had cheerleaders, dancers and the pep band. Here’s the story from which the photo came:

As the Down and Dirty Dawg pep band blared Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the theme to Hawaii Five-O, scores of University of Maryland, Baltimore County students marveled at the scene unfolding in the student commons, complete with cheerleaders, the school mascot, the school dance team and a chess set with pieces 6 feet tall.

“Are we allowed to play with those?” asked UMBC sophomore Rupa Patel of Annapolis, as classmates posed for cell-phone photos with the oversized pieces and hoisted them from square to square as if staging an impromptu game.

“Only at UMBC, I guess,” said freshman Kat Patterson of Silver Spring.

Her words were echoed by many who attended the chess pep rally earlier this week, arranged to stoke enthusiasm as the school prepared to host the President’s Cup today and tomorrow - the Final Four of college chess.

Last month, the school got swept up in its first-ever run to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but that was an anomaly. At UMBC, chess has long been king. It has won four President’s Cups since the event began in 2001. The game is woven into the identity of the Catonsville school, part of its aim to be viewed as a place where development of the mind takes priority over other pursuits.

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I know this, and I thought by now everyone knew it. If you toss a fair coin, the chance that heads will come up is 50%. But if you keep tossing, you can get arbitrarily long runs of heads—and of tails. It doesn’t mean that you have a “hot hand” in the coin toss—it just means that randomness can include multiple heads in a row. Similarly in gambling: winning x times in a row in a fair game of chance is not a “lucky streak”—it’s just a random clump.

I think I read that some initial CD players had “random” modes that were truly random, and people didn’t like it when the same track played 3 or 4 times in a row—which, of course, will happen if it’s truly random. So they changed the software and the name and it’s now generally called “shuffle” mode: a different order, but each track played but once.

At any rate, I was reminded of this when The Frontal Cortex reviewed some of the studies made of basketball players that demonstrate that the “hot hand” doesn’t exist. The post begins:

Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that “the hot hand” doesn’t exist. I’ve gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion gotten so much play.

The illusory nature of basketball shooting streaks was first demonstrated by Amos Tversky (of kahnemanandtversky fame) and Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell. They began the investigation by sifting through years of Philadelphia 76er statistics. They looked at every single shot taken by ever single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a string of hits or misses. If “the hot hand” was a real phenomenon, then players should have a higher field goal percentage after making several previous shots. The streak should elevate their game.

So what did the scientists find?

Continue reading.

I learned chess early, and somewhat later learned that I have no gift for the game: my chess expertise never matched my (somewhat modest) Go skill. But I do enjoy the game, and I thought this article by Gabe Schoenfeld (the senior editor of Commentary and a chess columnist for the New York Sun) was worth noting:

1. My 60 Memorable Games
By Bobby Fischer
Simon & Schuster, 1969

The great chess books are great less for their prose style than for their insight into the application of highly controlled violence. “My 60 Memorable Games” was written while Bobby Fischer was still on his steep ascent to the world-champion title — and long before the slide into madness that ended with his death in January. He recounts his eviscerations of some of the most brilliant minds of the mid-20th century. But Fischer was never content with victory alone; he aimed to inflict agony on his opponents — in his own words, “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego.” Where did such ferocity come from? Fischer, who never knew his own father, once explained that “children who grow up without a parent become wolves.”

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From EthanHam.com:

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever… it’s a surprisingly addictive “serious game” (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I’ve done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.

Take a look.

Go get it and make up some free games.

It’s very difficult to get a game on KGS if you have a “?” rating. I was at 11 kyu, but then didn’t play for a long while, so that my account was deleted and I was back with a ? rating. Even though I said in my challenge that I was around 11 kyu, I got no takers—until this morning. And when I challenged others about my rank, they declined the challenge.

But finally a very nice 10-kyu (one kyu stronger than 11 kyu) accepted my invitation to a game, and we just finished playing. I did lose, but only by 2.5 points (taking the komi into account). Nice game and we were both happy—though I think both of us looked at several missed opportunities. Still, I now have a rank, though it still has a ? attached: “12k?”. So perhaps I’ll have an easier time getting games.

Interesting approach to combating childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes: a cool video game. (The king of Diab is Etes.) Here’s info and here’s a look at the game.

Pretty impressive. And more at Science News (including a link to another video with shorter exposure times):

At Kyoto University in Japan, students and chimps saw an array of five of the numerals 1 through 9 flash onto a computer screen for just 650 milliseconds. When the numerals simultaneously turned into white squares, the subjects had to touch the squares in numerical order. The students managed to choose the squares in the correct order around 80 percent of the time, as did Ayumu, a young chimp, says Kyoto’s Tetsuro Matsuzawa.

The researchers then shortened the viewing time to 430 ms and finally to just 210 ms, which isn’t even enough time for a person’s eye to scan across a screen. For the briefest exposures, the students got the sequence right only 40 percent of the time, but Ayumu still managed nearly 80 percent accuracy.

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A guy recently decided to take up chess, and asked for advice. I weighed in with my thoughts, which I thought I’d share here.

First, the set: wood is my preference, and nowadays I like red and natural pieces more than black and natural—YMMV. The traditional Staunton design, because other designs don’t wear well over time: they’re interesting at first, but as you play over the months and years, that initial appeal doesn’t hold up.

I particularly like the sets made by the House of Staunton, which manages to get the base just right: as if the wood had turned molten for an instant and settled in a graceful curve—click the thumbnail and look at the bases to see what I mean. They also make the queen’s crown very pointy.

A king height of 4.0″ turns out to be best, in my opinion: larger and the usual boards won’t fit; smaller, and the pieces lack sufficient heft.

Regarding books, my only recommendation is to start with algebraic rather than English notation—that is, look at the way games are recorded. If the first move is shown as, say 1. e2-e4 (or, more tersely, simply e4, since the pawn at e2 is the only piece that can move to e4), that’s good. What you don’t want, these days, is a book in which the first move looks like this: 1. P-K4. Reason: all chess books these days use algebraic notation. It won.

The book that was highly recommended for a beginner is Play Winning Chess, by Yasser Seirawan. Check the library.

Most chess players are men, which I believe is mostly a matter of social conditioning. There are some very strong women players, but women are scarce in chess clubs, and are sometimes made to feel out of place (or feel that way on their own). And one interpretation of the game is quite Oedipal: the goal being to kill the king. (Reuben Fine has an essay about this someplace.)

Another aspect of social conditioning is a taste for competition: generally speaking, boys are raised (by social mores) to be competitive, and girls are raised to be cooperative. I’m sure that plays in there as well. Alfie Kahn has a very interesting book titled No Contest: The Case Against Competition, which talks about competition vs. cooperation.

The bridge players who wrote a little “We did not vote for Bush” sign on the back of a menu and held it up at an awards banquet caused quite a storm. I think this comment best expresses the sense (of those who still have sense) of the brouhaha.

The link is from a comment by The Son, but I wanted to give it more play because the comment is so good.

But the way they lost is surprising.

From Treehugger:

FreeRice is a computer game that tests your vocabulary and for every word that you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated through the United Nations to end world hunger.

Curious? It’s simple: a word pops up with multiple choice answers. If you click the right one then a harder word comes up and the level of difficulty keeps increasing. For every click 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. Since October 7, 2007 when it began, 164,650,960 grains of rice have been donated.

The site is funded by the advertisers: Macy’s, Fujitsu, Timelife, Apple, Office Depot, Reader’s Digest and many more whose names pop up as you play the game. The World Food Programme is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. Sounds good, so if you are bored, start playing and help the hungry while you’re at it.

Via The Wife, Boomshine. Hint: click the little speaker at the bottom right of the title screen to shut off the terrible New-Age dithering music so you get just the chimes of annihilation.

Just installed the current bridge computer program world champion, Jack 4.0. And I have printed from the Internet the ACBL Standard American Yellow Card bidding conventions—an important development with bridge play on the Web, since you and your partner probably have never played together and you need to be using the same bidding conventions.

And man, have those conventions changed. In my day an opening bid of, say 2 Spades was forcing to game. Now it’s a weak bid. <sigh> Change is difficult.

I was graduated from college in June 1961 and worked that summer at the IBM General Product Development Laboratory in Endicott NY. I was working on the IBM 1410, the newest model of the 1400 line of computers, succeeded by the 360 line with a totally different architecture. (In fact, the president of IBM had to go personally to the 1400 development group and assign its members to various different projects and locales because they wouldn’t stop working on it after the 36o was announced: they were determined that the 1400 would live.)

I recall intensive bridge games among the programmers. This was, in general, before computer science degrees, and the programmers had degrees in a variety of subjects: biology, music, philosophy, English, and the like. But they were all inclined to enjoy puzzles and algorithms, and bridge was a natural.

The games were played at lunchtime, and programmers were on the clock, so the dummy shuffled and dealt for the dealer: as soon as one hand ended, we could pick up the next hand’s cards and immediately start bidding. Occasionally, if the struggle was close, one would volunteer to take everyone’s time cards and clock them in while we finished the rubber. (I believe the statute of limitations has expired on this misdemeanor.)

Those were good games. And I continued to play the following year in graduate school in math, until I discovered Go.