Rosetta Game

[ronbo54]

From David Baker -
"The Rosetta game is about to go public! beat the crowds and start working your way up the world rankings, while honing skills you can soon put to use in CASP and in designing new proteins to help people worldwide.

Download the game at

http://fold.it/boinc

Have fun!"

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but thought someone else might like it.

[alpha]

The application doesn't work for me. Just brings up a plain white filled window with a small black filled box in the middle (presumably a login box or something).

I have crappy onboard video which probably doesn't help.

[paleseptember]

No idea where to post this, so I'll throw it in here for the moment.

The Rosetta@Home people have moved the Fold It! programme/game from closed Beta to open Beta.

Link: http://fold.it/

News article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508122520.htm

Instead of your computer trying all permutations to fold an amino acid sequence into a protein structure, your brain and intuition gets to have an intelligent attempt. It looks like you get Rosetta credit for manual folding.

*shrug* Worth a look anyhow. Ronbo54, alpha (names recognised), and tongz (an alias, maybe) are already on the Free-DC team :)

[alpha]

Ronbo did already post here (http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=14412) about it, but I suppose it is useful here too anyhow.

Still can't get it to work for me on the one computer I've tried. The latest version gets further but I still get half-blank dialogue boxes so I can't continue past the login box.

[paleseptember]

D'oh! I searched the forums, but didn't find that thread. :\

The program seems to work for me...

[jasong]

Apparently, you have to be a slave to one of the Steves to play. I´m not willing to fight with Wine, so I guess I won´t be trying it.

Edit: nm, Wine handles it perfectly, except for a complaint about a sound driver.

[paleseptember]

Jasong, took me a minute to work out "slaves to Steves" :rotfl: Very amusing.

The program is definitely not stable. It's trying to update for me, but flakes on the install of the update. Definitely beta quality at the moment. :swear:

I can't imagine linux support will be far away.

[Angus]

It looks like some mysterious benefactor (or two) has decided to get active in this project (game?). The Free-DC group (team) is now up to 23 place. Group Page (http://fold.it/portal/node/134172)

I tried this a few months back, and dropped it again over the goofy points awarding they were doing - inflating personal "solo" points with those of the group play. I don't even recall seeing a team at that time, but evidently ronbo54 created one.

Maybe I'll try again and see if it's improved.

[Death]

when we see a stats for this project? please, someone, tickle BoK. ))))

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

We'll see what we can do you know it all depends on if they are producing stats in a format we can use...

[Angus]

Unfortunately, they seem to play fast and loose with the stats - they have made a recent change so that only the last 4 months of results are counted. This is supposed to give the new players and teams a chance to compete for top spots. They also allow groups (teams) to be disbanded at will, so team stats can get trashed as well.

This is also an interactive "game" - you can't just set and forget like a normal distributed computing project. However - it is addictive :)

[alpha]

I never really got more than slightly interested in it. Had a couple of tries but couldn't see what all the fuss was about, seems pretty boring to me. Maybe I'll give it another try when I get around to putting a half decent graphics card in this thing.

It's nice to know we've got some team activity on here though.

[Death]

well, i got a 100% of cpu usage when running fold it.

[jasong]

I was messing with it just now, and apparently, as with most video games, what the computer may consider the best save position might not actually be the best.

I was about 18 points from a solution and getting frustrated, then decided to run the Shake Backbone command on a configuration with a lesser score, 5 seconds later I beat the puzzle.

[Paratima]

:rotfl: "Slave to the Steves" :rotfl:

Sorry for joining the party late. I've been busy. That's too funny, jasong!

[alpha]

OK, I finally put a 6600GT in my main machine and fired this up again. They now have training puzzles which I never saw before, which are pretty good at teaching you the basics.

I've just started playing with a real puzzle and managed to push our team up to 1st place for that protein! I'm ranked 7th overall for that protein so far.

I can definitely see myself wasting lots of time on this. It's addictive to keep improving your score. :)

[Angus]

Did you know you can work on team puzzle solutions?

For example, on the puzzle 132 'grand Challenge 10b', it looks loke a couple of shared solutions have been uploaded. If you can improve them by 1 point, you get "evolver' status and some more points for the team and yourself.

You get to the shared solutions from the 'Menu' menu in the game, click 'Open /Share Solutions', select the one on the left side you want to work on, download it to the right side, then use 'Load' to open it in your game. And have fun!

If you come up with something good, you can upload it the same way for others on the team to work on.

[Angus]

To the BOINC section, since it's kinda-sorta BOINC related (it uses some BOINC components) , and also uses Rosetta code in the background.

BTW, Free-DC is now up 10th place in the team competition, closing on Seti.Germany :guntotin:

[alpha]

Didn't know about sharing work within the group, I'll look into that.

I've been working on the latest puzzles (the <150 global point versions) and have got Free-DC up to first place in each. It's so addictive!

[Angus]

I have had a request from other Fold.It players to join the Free-DC team on Fold.It.

'ronbo54' was the original "Team Manager" but he hasn't been seen on here since 2008.

I'm thinking of asking the Fold.It admins to replace him with one of my accounts as team manager, since I'm the only one perpetually active on this. Any objections?

I've kept Free-DC in the top 10 teams for a couple of years now, essentially by myself. It would be nice to get some help and get the team higher up in the standings.

Also, Fold.It is going to compete in the upcoming CASP9 as a separate entity from Rosetta@HOME and the Baker lab crew.

[Bok]

No objection. Can't say I've ever even looked at it.

[alpha]

I might take part during CASP if I have time. I also need to try and remember to switch CPUs over to Rosetta during that period.

[Bigred]

Can somebody explain what this project is about and how it works? I have lots of time at work to do things like this but I don't know how it goes. Will it run along side boinc? There was mention of upgrading graphic cards. Is a high end card required?:dunno:

[alpha]

It's a human-participation project, making a "game" out of protein folding. You are presented with a protein and you pull it around and twist it about to try and get the best "score" you can. The scoring adds a competitive element (there are teams and stats) which in turn benefits the project with better results. IIRC, there is a tutorial which explains what all the different protein manipulation tools do and what kind of procedures you should go through to achieve the best possible score.

The key point of the project is that humans are better at folding proteins than computers.

Any half-modern graphics processor can handle it, and there are options to tweak if performance is an issue. The problems I mentioned earlier in the thread were with a poor on-board GPU, I think.

[Angus]

I run it on my Intel C2D MB with onboard video with decent performance.

They have added scripting capability in the last year which takes a lot of the drudgery out of fine tuning the proteins. You can kick off a script or "recipe" as they call it, and walk away for a bit.

The bad part performance-wise it that it's pretty CPU intensive, so it's not unusual to see close to 100% utilization with just the protein sitting still on the screen.

[Bigred]

I'll have a look at it Monday at work. Thanks guys.

[Maxwell]

I just discovered this...

Thanks for the link! I'm set up with the Free-DC team now!

[Note to self: Don't spend TOO much time on this... :Hugger:]

[Bigred]

Good for you.:thumbs:
:welcome:

[Angus]

I just discovered this...

Thanks for the link! I'm set up with the Free-DC team now!

[Note to self: Don't spend TOO much time on this... :Hugger:]

Welcome! to the protein folding party!:clap: