« Upgraded Blog Software | Baby Einstein Colour Kaleidoscope » |
For a fan of biology, as well as of puzzle games in general, this is one of the most amazing things I have seen in a long time.
Now, we already have things like Folding@Home, which is a distributed project that attempts to find low-energy conformations for proteins. Basically, the proteins that we are interested in are just chains of amino acids that get spewed out when DNA is transcribed. The protein "backbones" have side chains, which are just the side bits of the particular amino acid, and they vary in their love of or repulsion to water.
Proteins will settle into shapes that are lower-energy. Finding what those shapes might be so that we can deduce a bit about their function has been the aim of projects like Folding@Home.
Well, what if you took that whole concept and turned it into a game?
Not just a half-arsed game, either, but one with tutorials, warm-up puzzles, online teams and a pretty good interface to boot. It comes in Windows, Mac, and now Linux flavours as well.
That's just crazy nifty. Kudos to the folks who came up with that!
(One note: the link to the Windows version just after I signed up was pointing to the wrong place. I had to get the setup from this link. It's correct on the main page)
*laugh!*
I am here to testify that Ritchie played this game for hours, and had a good time doing it!