Two years ago students and instructors from the University of Washington applied human intuition to the problem of protein folding with the game FoldIt. Since then the game has proven that even under-educated players can out-fold the most powerful computers.

Could you win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for playing a computer game? Foldit is a game for the PC and Mac that takes the Folding@Home concept and adds a more human element to the mix. Instead of having a network of computers work through all of the possible shapes for folding proteins, a problem so huge it could take…