Phylo is a game project that was developed by two computer scientists: Jerome Waldispuhl and Mathieu Blanchette. Often, video games are referred to as a waste of time or a simple hobby to replace efficiency with fun. However, there is an almost unlimited amount of video game players around the world and through Phylo, these two computer scientists were able to tap into this unlimited resource and advance scientific observations. The simple game requires one to move around left or right the genome of different species and align common colors along a column. The more matches and the less empty spaces there are between blocks of genome, the higher the score.
A collection of these blocks generated by every player slowly benefits the genome study. Through Phylo, they were able to “sequence a single genome for less than a thousand dollars in a day” and thus this game is extremely money and time efficient. Through the masses’ participation with the game, long lists of different genome patters and similarities are catalogued and put into code so that the computer scientists can then program it to benefit the genome research. This information will then lead to possible ways to trouble shoot different diseases and aid in creating proteins that can potentially cure these diseases.
The beginner level starts simple, as there are only two genomes to match. As more and more layers and genes are added to the plate, it becomes much more difficult. There are several choices to consider such as how to minimize empty spaces between genomes, how to efficiently place the genome so that no changes need to be made again, and how to surpass the goal points they initially design. Once one reaches the end, the final score is shown. There is also a list of top scores with anonymous tags because this citizen science project is an anonymous contribution.
The question arises as to whether a computer designed to do these operations is a better option than opening it to the public. The benefits of having the people work on this project is that a computer who is designed to look for these patterns is hard to create and engineer. Computers do not have a natural ability to recognize patterns that humans do, and therefore creating a new program to do that is not cost efficient. Humans have this latent ability to recognize patterns. Harnessing another latent ability of humans, the need for lazy joy and procrastination, this program collects thousands of new genome correlations a day, which further progresses genome research and shows everyone a little bit more about the world.
Small screenshot of the game in play
After completion, this is the screen.
