As some of you may know, I'm on the crowdfunding/crowdsourcing business. And, related to that, I attended a crowdsourcing conference in London this week, where I got to see all kinds of stuff. Interesting stuff, scary stuff, uplifting stuff, and quite some clever stuff.

Why do I bring this up? Well, one of the speakers was going on about gamification, and how to "trick" people into playing "games" and use the gathered crowd to help with things they normally wouldn't. He presented a few games they've done that would contribute curing cancer, for instance.

And apparently just yesterday they launched a new game: quantum moves. Apparently it would help them build a quantum computer, somehow. I tried it out and it's not really my kind of game, even with the whole "quantum" thingy going for it, but I figured some people around here would be interested. Plus, it's DRM-free! Why make a game that needs to phone home by design in order to make users contribute to the cause DRM-free? No clue, but I played the game offline without issue. So yay for that.

Well, that's basically it. Honestly, I thought it was pretty cool, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of this stuff going around.

SLAVERY!
:D

Was the conference crowd funded?

I believe it was crowd sourced, similar but not the same.

Tons of crowd based buzzwords going around these days.

I remember something a few years ago, a game on Facebook that was supposed to help with Dutch Elm Disease and finding a cure for it.
I tried it, but it wasn't really much of a game and wasn't particularly fun, so I think they kind of missed the point...

Wasn't there something similar to this that helped with chemistry and wrapping/unwrapping molecules or something?

Interesting !

You're thinking of Folding@Home, which was about folding proteins. That wasn't a game though. It was just a process that used your computer's spare CPU cycles for scientific calculations. A similar, even earlier project was SETI@Home, which used the same method to analyze fragments of signals from space.

That's what I was thinking of.

Edit: I could probably do a game, but on the "rig" I have now there aren't many CPU cycles to spare XD.

Don't use past tense though. Folding@home is over here, SETI@home over here and they just recently started distributing data from the Breakthrough Listen initiative along with the usual stuff from Arecibo, and over here you can find a list of other projects using BOINC.

Sounds suspiciously like work!

thanks for posting :)

Well.
Wouldn't just informing people and really TRYING to do it from the ones in charge of our societies pretty much solve this?

Just informing, not really. Really trying at the top, yes, but that's not happening. So if you can do a little something, you do it because it sure beats doing nothing.