Cecilia Liao

Crowdsourcing does it again, creating a protein ‘18x more effective’ on Foldit game.

According to Co.Design:

It’s as if a mob of amateurs who knew nothing about cars collectively redesigned a Formula One engine to make it go 18 times faster. “I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it,” one of the researchers told Nature News. “Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space.”

It’s amazing to see how really technical problems could be solved by those with a fresh perspective, not just by subject matter experts. It makes you wonder what other problems that ‘wisdom of the crowd’ could solve - Greek debt problems? Breast cancer? Dependency on oil and gas? Or would wisdom of the crowd descend into an angry mob?

(Source: fastcodesign.com)