[HN Gopher] Gaming cancer: How citizen science games could help ...
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Gaming cancer: How citizen science games could help cure disease
Author : pseudolus
Score : 100 points
Date : 2025-07-13 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Nobody would like these kinds of games just like nobody has ever
| liked "educational" games.
|
| Why?
|
| Because they try too hard, since their main objective is not to
| be a good game.
|
| It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story is
| just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can vomit
| their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose interest
| real fast.
| MITSardine wrote:
| Beg to disagree, plenty of people love puzzle games. This
| doesn't need to appeal to everyone. The article cites two
| examples of such games that lead to scientific progress.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Your reply is orthogonal to my point
| codingdave wrote:
| > Nobody ever
|
| You might be exaggerating just a wee bit. Oregon Trail is the
| epitome of an educational game with lasting popularity, having
| been around pretty much as long as PCs. There are others --
| Carmen Sandiego comes quickly to mind, and arguably even Kerbal
| Space Program. I'm sure some actual searching could compile a
| decent list.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(series)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The goal of these games is probably closer to Kerbal Space
| Program or MS Flight Simulator than an "educational" game.
|
| Imagine playing within the parameters and finding a combination
| that brings unexpected results. It's probably harder to design
| than a standard game, but I think there's potential to have
| something pretty entertaining otherwise.
| anton-c wrote:
| To be honest i agree, idk if I gained a ton of _knowledge_
| from KSP(I know what deltaV is now) but man does that stuff -
| as well as the flight simulators - let you grok some concepts
| better than any other way. Except actually flying I guess.
|
| Seeing a planet on the map appear close but be invisible,
| then turning into my whole view really helped me grasp the
| distance between bodies in space. And KSP is scaled down!
|
| Reading about stalls helps but crashing the tutorial Cessna
| twelve times really helps you understand what a stall is and
| why it happens.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Plague Inc. is fun and (I assume) _unintentionally_
| educational.
|
| It taught me a lot of (simplified) country locations and
| population sizes.
| diggan wrote:
| I think that's the point of parents comment, it's
| unintentionally educational, but primarily supposed to be
| fun. If it was built with educational as the primary concern,
| and fun being secondary, then probably the game wouldn't have
| wound up as popular.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's how I understood
| parents comment.
| thrance wrote:
| > It's like reading a novel and immediately noticing the story
| is just some thinly veiled bullshit so that the author can
| vomit their own personal view of the world. It makes you lose
| interest real fast.
|
| Cue John Galt's 100-pages monologue at the end of Atlas
| Shrugged.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| People will hurt themselves only to avoid boredom. People play
| souls games exactly because they are hard and offer a
| challenge.
|
| The protein folding games paved the way to AlphaFold.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Never played Number Muncher?
| throaway198764 wrote:
| Math Blaster, Number / Word Muncher, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon
| Trail, Crosscountry Canada
| armada651 wrote:
| > nobody has ever liked "educational" games.
|
| You take that back, I loved educational games as a kid! There
| were indeed plenty of crappy ones out there, but some were
| really well-made. For example, Pink Panther's Passport to Peril
| was a charming point-and-click adventure that taught you about
| cultures in other countries.
|
| There's a small cult following in the Netherlands for these
| types of edutainment games and a small group of people have set
| out to archive all of them:
| https://nationaalarchiefeducatievegames.nl/
| Loughla wrote:
| Oregon trail, gadgets and gizmos, lost mind of Dr. Brain, lost
| island of Dr. Brain, math blaster, Carmen San Diego.
|
| All educational games and all PHENOMENAL.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| Mavis Beacon disagrees!
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| This article did such a disservice in describing how gamers were
| helping cure disease. I had to dig further. In the article
| linked, it does a much better job of explaining in my opinion.
|
| "Paradigm Shift in Designing Therapeutics
|
| This kind of work isn't possible with computers alone. The number
| of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable method for
| enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can't solve this problem
| efficiently. However, humans are unparalleled at recognizing
| patterns. As Kim points out, computers don't go into discussion
| forums to exchange ideas on how to push forward, but Eterna's
| players do. They also constantly pick up on each other's designs
| and then work to improve them.
|
| "The players are designing things at incredibly granular levels
| while staying in touch with all the complex biological rules that
| we impose on them," he says. "It's allowing us to solve this
| incredibly complex problem through a video game interface. I
| honestly don't think a lot of players fully understand the
| complexity of the problems that they're addressing.""
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/a-game-playing-app-m...
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| This description does a disservice claiming the work isn't
| possible with computers. The papers on FoldIt do a much better
| job of describing taking optimization and communication
| strategies from players and implementing them in code to
| improve the existing algorithms.
|
| I mean the first sentence about enumeration and efficiency just
| shows how shallow the discover article is; the whole area of
| optimization is about efficiently finding optimal solutions
| without enumerating all possibilities.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >This kind of work isn't possible with computers alone.
|
| To be honest this is the kind of science journalism quote which
| hurts science journalism a lot. Not only is it plainly false,
| the explanation is even worse. Any normal person reading this
| paragraph can not possibly come away with a correct
| understanding of the issue involved.
|
| >The number of possible combinations are beyond any reasonable
| method for enumeration, and thus algorithms alone can't solve
| this problem efficiently.
|
| The number of ways to go from city A to city B is also not
| enumerable by any computer. Yet efficient algorithms to find a
| good path exist. Clearly the size of the problem space is not
| the issue.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Ender's Game for cancer?
| MITSardine wrote:
| Reverse ant algorithms?
| JimiofEden wrote:
| I keep returning to Zachtronics games endlessly in my free time,
| despite doing engineering work for 8-10 hours a day for the last
| months. Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming
| challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the
| ones that are basically using assembly. I even had someone
| reference that my latest Opus Magnum creation looks like cellular
| automata.
|
| If you can simplify the problem/solution space into a puzzle,
| give me a leaderboard to compete against, more specifically let
| me compete against the people I care about, and give it the
| barest amount of polish, it's the kind of thing someone like me
| would obsess over.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Zachtronics games are great! Very challenging. They made a big
| splash with Space Chem a while back. I need to go back to Opus
| Magnum and finish it...
| hcs wrote:
| Zach's next game Kaizen comes out tomorrow!
| https://coincidence.games/kaizen/
| jader201 wrote:
| Oooh... a factory automation Zachtronics game??
|
| Take my money.
| zeristor wrote:
| Sounds like it's come out just in time.
|
| I thought Zachtronics had given up making games for some
| reason. Or did I dream that, if I did that would be really
| weird.
| jader201 wrote:
| I need to try some of their other ones. I've only played Opus
| Magnum, which I loved.
|
| But being the completionist that I am, I stopped playing it
| once I got to a level I wasn't able to perfectly optimize
| across all three measurements.
| ryandv wrote:
| > Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge,
| but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that
| are basically using assembly.
|
| They are indeed "real," bonafide (though perhaps sophomoric)
| programming problems. There is an Exapunks puzzle that has you
| implement a form of binary tree search/traversal in assembly.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Esoteric programing languages is the term you both are
| looking for. I think the Zachtronic languages fit firmly in
| there somewhere.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language
| ryandv wrote:
| Usually I see that term applied to Turing tarpits,
| intentionally obfuscated languages, joke/meme languages, or
| ones with highly heterodox syntax. Zachtronic languages are
| really none of these and closer to an assembly (reduced)
| instruction set architecture. What makes them toy-like
| languages is that the "machine" you're writing assembly for
| is rather oversimplified, and is in fact totally
| fictitious.
| RataNova wrote:
| Wild how often these games end up sparking ideas or techniques
| I end up using IRL
| RataNova wrote:
| I think there's still a challenge in balancing engagement and
| scientific rigor. Making a game that's genuinely fun and
| scientifically valuable isn't easy. But if done right, this could
| be a massive unlock and not just for cancer research, but for any
| complex system where intuition and creativity matter as much as
| formal training.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| EVE Online has something similar with their Project Discovery!
|
| https://www.eveonline.com/discovery
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| Ender's Game for biology
| zeristor wrote:
| $60...
|
| Did we jump 5 months into the future where $60 is the norm?
|
| I'm guess this is probably aimed at the standard academic market,
| but even so more books like this could maybe help tackle cancer.
|
| That and not having toxic drinking water from PFAS
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