"Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score," said (UW associate professor of computer science and engineering) Zoran Popovic. "They can't even explain what they're doing, but somehow they're able to do it."

Created by University of Washington doctoral student Seth Cooper and postdoctoral researcher Adrien Treuille, working with Zoran Popovic, professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David Baker, and David Salesin, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, the game could revolutionize the way medical research is done.

"We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by," said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. "Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize."

The team consulted with game developers in creation of Foldit, which along with human intuition introduces a competitive element to protein folding, allowing for players to create teams that will eventually compete against top researchers around the world. The game has been in testing with puzzles involving known proteins, and now they are beginning to move on to puzzles with unknown solutions. Later this year they intend to introduce proteins they wish existed, allowing players to possibly create all new biological creations within a game.

It remains to be seen how effective the Foldit is, but the concept itself is pure genius. If they could integrate this sort of thing into the Folding@Home project or just introduce it to consoles as a downloadable game via PSN or Xbox Live Arcade, they've immediately have some of the best minds in gaming at their disposal. Hell, with the push and pull mechanism of the puzzles I've played so far, even WiiWare wouldn't be out of the question, though then the medical community would have to tackle an even bigger problem - friend codes.

Computer Game's High Score Could Earn The Nobel Prize In Medicine [ScienceDaily]

Stanford University's Folding@Home program has gotten a lot of play this week, and so it should. The program harnesses the power of idling PC's and PS3's to calculate data that will eventually help find cures for Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's, various types of Cancer and other diseases.

This is all well and good and I'm sure we all want to do something to help the cause, but how does this program really work? What exactly is protein folding and what will be the eventual outcome? GameVideos producer Kathleen Sanders finds out in this sit down interview with Sony's r&d manager, Dr. Richard Marks.

This is a program all owners of the PS3 should try and opt into if they can. I know I would if I actually had a PS3, but I will be downloading the PC version to use on my computer here at home. If you are interested in joining a team for the experiment, why not join our own newly formed Team Kotaku. And as Kathleen so eloquently puts it at the end of the interview, "If you don't download it, then you're kind of automatically an asshole."

I will warn you: this is a very scientifical and techie interview with lots of big words, so if it's early where you are, you might want to down a couple cups of coffee before taking this one on.