AnewDomain eds are taking some of our favorite Solve for X talks, inspired by a Google project with scientists and theorists as a challenge for “moonshot” thinking to solve major problems with out of the box ideas. The last two of of our five best Solve for X Talks — still undecided and actively debated by a team of AND staff — for fourth and fifth spots will run before midnight 12 PT.
Hosted by Eric Schmidt, this was quite the collection of brains.
Not an easy task. But this one was easy. We all loved it. It’s by Adrien Treuille, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, who believes big science tasks should be solved by big human collaboration.
He proposes that future important scitech advances will be cloud-sourced to an almost ubiquitous agree. Crazy? Like a fox. Listen to his logic. He talks about EteRNA and Foldit, scientific discovery games where individual gamers are beginning to beat the best computer programs in DNA folding and RNA nano-fabrication problems … worth it if you’re like me, a science and chem geek : )
Disclosure: This writer wrote The Genomics Age (2005) and is well acquainted with the RNA folding and other work over at Carnegie Mellon. She in no way will profit from this article.
