Gamers Solve Stubborn Viral Mystery: The Shape Of A Key Enzyme : Shots - Health Blog : NPR

JS Greenfield (jsg68) wrote:

The notion that the gamers found a proverbial "outside the box" solution is misplaced here. Optimization problems are fundamentally simple, and well-defined in nature. e.g., if you consider the classic optimization problem, the travelling salesman problem (and for the record, it's long-established that all optimization problems are equivalent), where a salesman has to visit a large number of cities, and needs to find the shortest route to visit each city once, there's a well-defined number of possible routes. You don't get to redefine the problem so that you can travel via cosmic wormholes.

What's more, the gamers conducted their efforts within the confines of a simulation/game that is, itself, a computer program. By definition, they could not solve the problem by any means other than what the program facilitated.

So I repeat, there is some fundamental information that is missing from this story. Though the article proposes that some fundamental insight leading to an "illogical decision" accounts for the success of the gamers, that's quite assuredly not the case. We have yet to see a cogent explanation for why gamers succeeded quickly, where standard optimization techniques had previously failed.

Tue Sep 20 2011 17:59:03 GMT-0700 (PDT)