While the Serious Games juggernaut continues to garner support from the public and private sector for its battery of worthy (and of course entertaining) products, the BBC (and others) reported this weekend that a more passive form of solving the world's ills could lie in a forthcoming device hitherto considered entertainment. According to a recent press release, the PlayStation 3 console might contain within it the computing potential that could contribute to scientific knowledge. All hail Citizen Science.
However, as bambino_tostare suggested in an email to the gamesblog, this is reminiscent of the types of things found under "rumour mill" in the pre-PlayStation 2 marketing push. Our favourite? That it was feared that the mighty machine would be used as missile control computers (see footnote 14) in Iraq.
Says IGN:
Via a partnership between Sony and the Folding@home distributed computing project, a client is being developed that will allow idle Cell Processors to turn their considerable computational power from crunching the polygons that makeup curvaceous videogame breasts to crunching the math of folding proteins that hold the secret to curing cancer. Like the old SETI@home project that harnessed idle PCs to analyze masses of data collected by radio telescopes in hopes of discovering signals from another world, the Folding@home project will rely upon an army of PlayStation 3s rather than expensive super computers.
Rather less fanboy-esque information comes from the Folding@Home PS3 FAQ page:
Our goal is to apply this new technology to push Folding@Home into a new level of capabilities, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and certain forms of cancer. With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.
There are many other citizen science projects out there. SETI@home is a progenitor to many of the distributed computing projects in process today, and is one of the most famous. For more information, check out the Radio 4's Citizen Science series.
