Human Computation

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

From New Scientist

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help.

Read more at the About page: http://fold.it/portal/info/science

You could also read the article at WIRED: http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-05/ff_protein?currentPage=all

I just gotten the game installed in my computer. It’s an interesting concept, using games to solve a problem.

Dr. James McAuliffe of the Stamford school of Zoology performed a series of experiments on the baboons using laptop computers. What he discovered was amazing. His findings were reported in the Journal of American Zoology this month.

“Baboons and chimpanzees can use computers, do software testing, and even program,” explained Dr. McAuliffe. But they had some problems handling simple menu navigation. “Higher primates are very intelligent, but we found that they had problems with deeply nested menus. We found that these animals had trouble with multi-way branches beyond 2 levels. At first, these primates simply could not repeat a multi-way menu navigation.”

After simple training in Windows® menu navigation, McAuliffe presented the baboons with modern development tools. Predictably, they were baffled by anything to do with modern Java IDEs such as SunONE®, Visual Age® and Jbuilder®. None of the animals understood the Java programming language, even the ‘alpha’ animals.

However, most subjects immediately understood Visual Basic 3.0, and even displayed some comprehension of the VB3 debugger and simple VB data types. Most subjects could change properties of custom controls in the Properties window, and displayed some understanding of advanced concepts such as read-only properties.

Hey Ridzuan, you should see this:

Test subjects with the best results were baboons and bonobo apes. Both primate species demonstrated stressful behaviors when presented with Java tools and utilities.

It’s okay I can get stress too, haha…

http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/pressroom.asp#higher