A new game helps to fight COVID-19

Join Gamer Folding@home team and help research a cure for Covid-19

A couple of weeks ago we learned about a new game called Foldit, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, that could help with the development of a treatment for the Covid-19 coronavirus. Essentially, players solve puzzles by folding protein chains into new shapes that change the function of the protein, with points awarded based on the effectiveness of the solution. Researchers can then experiment on those folded proteins in order to determine their usefulness in the real world.

If that game doesn't appeal to you, but you happen to be sitting beside an expensive, powerful PC that's not really doing anything, why not let it handle the task for you?

In Foldit you have to work for a spot on that leaderboard, but through Folding@home, you can put your PC to work. Folding@home is a distributed computing project founded by Stanford University in 2000 that uses idle PCs around the world for medical research, including the coronavirus pandemic.

The way it works, essentially, is that protein data is broken up into work units, which are then downloaded automatically by the Folding software. Your PC crunches away on it until the work unit is complete, at which point the result is uploaded to the server. A new work unit is downloaded, and the process starts again. As a weak but thematically appropriate analogy, it's a bit like Team Fortress 2, except extraordinarily slow, it's nothing but bots, and the whole world is playing in the same match.