To solve a puzzle in AIDS research that has "stumped scientists for over a decade," the University of Washington harnessed the speedy ingenuity of online gamers:
"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," said Firas Khatib, a lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. … Seth Cooper, a co-creator of Foldit [a program created by the university a few years ago that transforms problems of science into competitive computer games], added, "People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at. Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week's paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."
Full study here (pdf). Carl Franzen thinks even bigger:
Foldit represents one of the most concrete examples of an emerging discipline known as the gamification of society - the idea that videogaming skills and conventions can be harnessed to solve all sorts of real-world problems in medicine, health, architecture, personal responsibility, employment, traffic dynamics and law enforcement.
The Dish 