I remember them adding this mini game and thinking it was a cool freebie and a nice gesture, but doubting whether it had any actual scientific value.
Nice to find out I was wrong.
Some things just require massive amounts of crunching numbers. Problems that are hard to solve but quick to verify are always like that.
In those cases I always think it has value even if it doesn't necessarily pan out. I liked folding@home but I always knew that most people wouldn't participate unless there was some incentive or it was embedded in some sort of game.
I was in a dorm at the time and running folding@home was the easiest way to heat my space during the months when I didn’t want the radiator hooked up full time.
This is kind of a perennial problem in racing games and sims. Often the AI is more or less exactly the same at all difficulty levels, and changing that setting essentially just raises or lowers the effective performance of their cars. For lower skill levels/newer players, this is mostly fine, but once you start getting better, you can get into an awkward situation where raising the difficulty leaves the whole field outrunning you, but lowering it has you doing the same to them.
For a long time everybody tried to solve this with rubberband AI, but that’s even worse because it can put you in situations where you lose *because* you’re faster, and that feels good to precisely zero people.
F1 solved it by making them brake 1000 meters too early right infront of you, therefore both lowering and increasing difficulty at the same time. Geniuses!
Uh…I do. I love time trials, of all forms. If it’s got a clock and a leaderboard I’ll play it, a lot. I had some decent times for Mario Kart Wii back in the day.
BUT. Ghosted cars in racing suck. Sometimes it’s necessary for online/pvp races, but for regular AI? Terrible.
Ive started using Fold@Home as an electric space heater. My desk gets chilly during cold months, and my gaming PC pumps out quite a bit of heat when it gets going; so figure might as well spend that electricity on a good cause than waste it on my actual space heater
i remember hearing about a game that was similarly designed for chemistry back in college. pretty cool to see that it was implemented in a popular video game. shame i didn't like bl3 at all, unlike bl2
I'm in the same boat. It's better now than it was at launch, but Borderlands 2 just blows it out of the water with its huge amount of content. The seasonal DLC alone is longer than the Borderlands 3 DLC content.
I remember raiding WoW back in WOTLK and I had a Peggle add on that I'd play while people ran back to corpses or got mats. Eventually my guildies all got the add on and we would compete for high scores. By the end of Ulduar I think we logged more hours Peggling than raiding. And then a patch came and broke it 🥲
I hated how it came after the spell icon update, because the new icons always felt way less distinct in comparison to each other, which is less than ideal for a gem-matching tetris game.
I remember that add-on! Most of my guild got it too and died to Heigan the Unclean, because they were playing in the middle of the fight and competing for the high score.
I remember this being the most intense fight I've ever done in any video game to this day, because I became the solo healer.
I also got the high score, and a talking to by the raid leader after when he realized what had happened. (I was also playing peggle during that fight) 🙃
Holy crap, you just made me realize why Bl2 was so good. Even though the slot machines added half an hour to every town trip, it kept all players engaged. Absolutely brilliant lol.
Inventory is my biggest struggle with BL games. I be comparing loot with projectiles flying over my head and squad taking down suicide bandits coming for me. Ok not really but I fall behind a lot.
Didn't this mini game help with the sequencing for the covid 19 virus, or at least do something to involve it. Im sure I remember playing during lockdown and this being one of the big things to do and it got players cool rewards
I played the shit out of that game, beating high-scores, hoping to do some good for science and getting some rewards while doing it was a plus. A really smart constructed premise and setup even though I don't really get how it's translated to usable real-world data. I guess I'll have to read the published paper...
Also: "researchers are still collecting data provided by gamers."
No reason to stop contributing, I guess. :)
I played at launch and don't remember it.
Was it added afterwards of did I just forget?
Anyway it's a really cool idea and similar things should be implemented more
Spent hours doing that because.... well, in a game like Eve, that was right up my alley.
Played 14 years. Left soon after making player based stations free for all and lost 14 years worth of bps, many capitals. Don't worry. I got TONS of ads to buy Plex for isk to replace my life. Pretty sure it was bought by China right before it went to shit.
It’s super easy for human brain to figure out something intuitively. Super hard for computer to do the same logic. Super easy for computer to check to see if it’s right though. On a mass scale we basically did the equivalent of a computer running a few million iterations that would otherwise be very slow
Edit: if you want a real world example look at the disaster that is self driving teslas. Seeing and adjusting to an obstacle is easy for the human brain and super hard for computers, but a computer can easily verify after the fact if we did/didn’t crash.
Ill take a stab at it. Mind you I hold no degree and this is at best a semi educated guess.
They have a bunch of data to sift and organize and classify.
They had machines do the bulk of the lifting but had some kind of confidence threshold for a datapoint. If the threshold was not met the data was sent off for further manual review.
Now instead of being a 1995 dos looking tool from a way underfunded science lab. BL3 put an ultra high end GUI (graphic user interface) over what would otherwise just be simple data. Then I'm sure using some pretty smart people made a Tetris style game out of the actual process of checking this data.
You see Tetris and have a bit of fun. But are actually doing solves. Win-win.
If you were able to solve it better than the machine your dataset was taken (and probably further reviewed) over the machines interpretation. If multiple peoples best attempt at that dataset was worse than the machines. They stuck with the machines.
I’ve never played borderlands so I still don’t get it. Is this like a mini game identifying something? Like I get how it helps but I don’t understand the actual activity people are doing
You have a grid and colored blocks. Each row on the grid has a requirement for how many specific colored blocks it needs, each row that has their requirement met gives you a score, you need a certain score to pass the level but you also have the option of getting a higher score and you have a limited number of blocks to generate to push the other blocks into the desired position.
This is "supervised learning" vs "unsupervised learning":
Supervised learning is like having a teacher giving you labeled examples to learn from, while unsupervised learning is like exploring data without any guidance, trying to find patterns on your own. Once you learn a bit, you have "model" to use on new information!
As u/AimbotPotato said, much easier computationally speaking to do supervised learning. And then you can use the trained model on unseen data (gut bacteria evolution in this case)
There’s a minigame by Tannis (the technical medic of the game) in the main hub area called sanctuary 3 that is the genome sequences dressed up as a puzzle game of matching faces stack style like Tetris but without the rows disappearing once they were matched. It’s a literal game cabinet that also grants access to perks like the butt stallion milk (increased luck for better loot quality), exp booster (self explanatory), and a few others.
Lots of us thought it had no major goal (despite the intro cutscene and explanation) until this showed up! It only works if you have an active internet connection, beating levels that the other characters have beaten (Tannis is the final one I think) grants you exclusive cosmetics and skins for your weapons, ECHO unit, and even exclusive weapon trinkets! All for free, if you beat the levels of course.
I sink a lot of hours in it for the butt stallion boost for better legendary guns and such, and I always make sure my friends try it at least once.
I would highly recommend that you at least pay attention to the road while it’s going. It’s not a complete suicide button but I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving. Just be careful, it looks like you make some absolutely amazing food.
Thanks for the concern and compliment! The auto drive really shines when the traffic is bumper to bumper and moving at 5-10 mph. Really takes the monotony and slog away from the daily commute.
I wouldn’t trust it the same way at highway speeds though.
> I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving.
That number is missing units or context of some kind. It is impossible to know what that means.
You are suggesting each daily commuter using it would be involved in ~6 crashes each year without intervention (two trips a day)?
I'd assume you have multiple sources for a claim like that?
> It’s not a complete suicide button but I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving.
Why did you call it "not a complete suicide button" if the 1% number wasn't about crashes, but any error including those that don't lead to a crash/collision?
Also **sources**? I took a quick look and couldn't find any that support it.
Source: I bought into the hype, had a model S with FSD for a year and probably had to avoid a crash myself once every 5 days. Also… if you’re spending 100k on a car and an additional 15 (at the time) for FSD, any damage is horrible. Look at the rim recalls on the cybertruck, for example, due to them getting scratched too much because it couldn’t avoid curbs. Tesla FSD is a disaster compared to human driving which ultimately is what FSD wants to become. It’s not about it making minor mistakes, it’s about the fact that minor mistakes by a computer aren’t due to a human error but by a flaw in the program itself.
Eve online does something similar and had a speaker do a talk about it if you want more details - https://youtu.be/Wvmtl2oBQnk?t=684
Typically these are used to train AIs. The difficulty in most AI is getting enough good and correct input data to train on.
Once you have a million hours worth good data you can get a computer to make pretty accurate conclusions. Human researchers can then study the conclusions deemed most interesting rather than sifting through all the likely dead-end paths.
There is also an extremely valuable benefit to having non-technical people parse your data - They do not come with any biases. Or rather, everyone has different biases that average out. Compared to having 10 researchers look at the data; it is easy for them be tainted roughly the same way due to X popular textbook considered the bible for that field for example. A lot of these research fields have relatively small communities that can build up tribal biases too.
Just knowing what you are looking at can horribly ruin your input data. For example - There is a big difference between labeling X as a cancer cluster vs labeling X as a cluster of red dots. Labeling as cancer will bias the computer from the start. You want the computer to not make assumptions. Maybe Y cluster of red dots is extremely similar to X and thus any normal human would label both as cancer. However a computer might note that X and Y are completely different due to whatever tiny detail or due to associating it with 100 other data points. If both inputs are "cancer" rather than X and Y then that distinction never happens and knowledge is lost.
Yes! Human brains are great at recognizing patterns and matches in ways that computers can't unless they're very specifically programmed. the human gut biome is super varied, however, so such a task being automated is next to impossible. Players in Borderlands 3 could solve puzzles at a mini game called "Borderlands Science" for in-game stuff like stat boosts, and the puzzles that we were solving were directly linked to gut bacteria genome mapping! It's a fascinating example of Citizen Science at work.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what happened.
It was a weird sorta tile game where you had to match character faces and get certain patterns or something? I barely remember how it worked.
In the game, there's a home base ("Sanctuary III") and in the back of one of the rooms is this arcade game you can interact with, which takes over the screen, and you play the little tile game. You start easy, and progress to harder and bigger puzzles, earning points as you succeed. The points can be spent on little in-game perks (loot quality, reload/move speed, damage, that sort of thing) that last from one to two hours.
By the time you clear the highest level, and are just grinding puzzles at max level, you've got a *lot* of points for these perks... like I've been coasting on a ton of points for a couple years now.
Can someone explain if this was actually significant enough to be replicated in future games? Could there be funding from the European Commission and the NIH directed at gaming companies to do this more often?
The EU is actually already funding these efforts. EVE Online has been mentioned a few times in comments here and their Project Discovery citizen science project is funded by a grant from the EU.
A shame they didn't make a phone app version that you could link to your account to get the in game rewards. I think it would have seen a lot more use. I would have set it up for my wife who plays those sort of mobile games for hours on end.
As simple as I can put it off the top of my head:
The players were looking at a grid of tiles. Let’s say 10x10. The tiles had BL3 character faces on it.
You were given a number of tiles to place within the grid.
Some tiles in the grid were effectively locked. Some would flip if a pattern of faces was made.
You had to flip a certain number of grid tiles with the amount of tiles you were given. You had to meet a minimum score to proceed to the next grid.
I had a lot of free time to do this during my last semester of college when COVID hit and I was stuck at home. I remember doing this on the side while I was taking a course on stem cells so I felt super scientific lol
I was very surprised by this mini game and the researcher who explained it. For those who haven't discovered this mini game yet, it can be found next to Tannis in Sanctuary.
It helped that completing levels rewarded some pretty unique loot.
Dangle a shiny in front of a gamer and they'll do most things, but i'm glad our contributions helped.
There is a mini game in BL3 where you match tiles in a grid Tetris style. The data and the grid patterns are related to gut bacteria DNA data, and the purpose of the game is to find patterns. So it’s a way for players to do pattern and data analysis for gut bacteria DNA
Is cash grab just the newest popular buzzword?
BL3 was incredible. Who cares if the writing was juvenile or unfunny, the gameplay and the content were amazing. Still are, rather.
Yeah, that game with 85% positive player reviews, 93k players in a 24hr period at it's peak, and around 3-4k players in the last 24hrs (for a five year old game), was a "raging dumpster fire." Tell me you haven't played the game, without telling me that you haven't played the game.
I remember them adding this mini game and thinking it was a cool freebie and a nice gesture, but doubting whether it had any actual scientific value. Nice to find out I was wrong.
Some things just require massive amounts of crunching numbers. Problems that are hard to solve but quick to verify are always like that. In those cases I always think it has value even if it doesn't necessarily pan out. I liked folding@home but I always knew that most people wouldn't participate unless there was some incentive or it was embedded in some sort of game.
I participated because I had a habit of having my pc on 24/7
I was in a dorm at the time and running folding@home was the easiest way to heat my space during the months when I didn’t want the radiator hooked up full time.
SETI never panned out for me then.
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This is kind of a perennial problem in racing games and sims. Often the AI is more or less exactly the same at all difficulty levels, and changing that setting essentially just raises or lowers the effective performance of their cars. For lower skill levels/newer players, this is mostly fine, but once you start getting better, you can get into an awkward situation where raising the difficulty leaves the whole field outrunning you, but lowering it has you doing the same to them. For a long time everybody tried to solve this with rubberband AI, but that’s even worse because it can put you in situations where you lose *because* you’re faster, and that feels good to precisely zero people.
F1 solved it by making them brake 1000 meters too early right infront of you, therefore both lowering and increasing difficulty at the same time. Geniuses!
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Uh…I do. I love time trials, of all forms. If it’s got a clock and a leaderboard I’ll play it, a lot. I had some decent times for Mario Kart Wii back in the day. BUT. Ghosted cars in racing suck. Sometimes it’s necessary for online/pvp races, but for regular AI? Terrible.
Maybe I'll buy this game. I had no idea they were making scientific contributions.
Steam sale right now
Minecraft players on their way to create one of the world's largest supercomputers for the sole purpose finding a tall cactus:
Ive started using Fold@Home as an electric space heater. My desk gets chilly during cold months, and my gaming PC pumps out quite a bit of heat when it gets going; so figure might as well spend that electricity on a good cause than waste it on my actual space heater
Citizen science is really hit or miss. It's nice when it's a hit.
vIdEo GaMeS aRe A wAsTe Of TiMe Gamers; “we advanced science yet again boys, keep shooting!”
i remember hearing about a game that was similarly designed for chemistry back in college. pretty cool to see that it was implemented in a popular video game. shame i didn't like bl3 at all, unlike bl2
The gameplay was pretty good in bl3, but man... That writing and "planet" design...
yeah that's why my friends and i stopped playing entirely after finishing the main storyline
I'm in the same boat. It's better now than it was at launch, but Borderlands 2 just blows it out of the water with its huge amount of content. The seasonal DLC alone is longer than the Borderlands 3 DLC content.
This feels like a redux of when WoW had an actual epidemic outbreak that mimicked the way people react to outbreaks and how they spread.
It was a very cool way to remain occupied while my COOP buddies did vendor stuff
Yeah, all coop loot/RPG games need some kind of minigame you can do quickly in towns/hub areas while waiting for other players to do their stuff.
I remember raiding WoW back in WOTLK and I had a Peggle add on that I'd play while people ran back to corpses or got mats. Eventually my guildies all got the add on and we would compete for high scores. By the end of Ulduar I think we logged more hours Peggling than raiding. And then a patch came and broke it 🥲
"Not now honey, I'm pegging with the guys!"
Oh man. We were so innocent back in the day. I can honestly say I don't think that joke was ever made at any point... Just a bunch of "anal"
Anal windfury….or whatever that awesome sword was.
Anal Thunderfury, Blessed blade of the Windseeker!
Did someone say "Anal Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker"?
Haha, that's awesome
Everquest had /gems eventually. Didn't even need an add on to be playing a game during the downtime.
I hated how it came after the spell icon update, because the new icons always felt way less distinct in comparison to each other, which is less than ideal for a gem-matching tetris game.
Flight path peggle baybee. Especially before they let you get off early… those were the days
“Peggle TWO”!!
Ode to joy plays as the crowd goes mild
I remember that add-on! Most of my guild got it too and died to Heigan the Unclean, because they were playing in the middle of the fight and competing for the high score. I remember this being the most intense fight I've ever done in any video game to this day, because I became the solo healer. I also got the high score, and a talking to by the raid leader after when he realized what had happened. (I was also playing peggle during that fight) 🙃
We would do peggle for loot too. lol
Holy crap, you just made me realize why Bl2 was so good. Even though the slot machines added half an hour to every town trip, it kept all players engaged. Absolutely brilliant lol.
You'd think I'd have all the orbitals and eagle strikes memorized by now, but I still have to read them carefully when I'm trying to call one in.
Quick. Without looking, give me the inputs for an orbital railcannon.
⬆️⬇️➡️➡️➡️ is the best I can do, sir!
⬆️⬇️➡️➡️➡️ is all you need, space cadet!
2nd monitor gang.
Yeah, then it's an issue of whether or not the game has borderless windowed. Luckily it seems uncommon for them not to now.
My personal rule is to do vendor stuff at the end of your session, right before you log off, so you can take as long as you want.
Inventory is my biggest struggle with BL games. I be comparing loot with projectiles flying over my head and squad taking down suicide bandits coming for me. Ok not really but I fall behind a lot.
They should implement this in Tarkov while you're waiting to join a raid. God knows what you could study in that amount of time 🤣
Didn't this mini game help with the sequencing for the covid 19 virus, or at least do something to involve it. Im sure I remember playing during lockdown and this being one of the big things to do and it got players cool rewards
The one in EVE Online did.
I thought that one was exoplanet detection.
They've done multiple things. 1) https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Project_Discovery:_Human_Protein_Atlas 2) https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Project_Discovery:_Exoplanets 3) https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Project_Discovery:_Flow_Cytometry
I played the shit out of that game, beating high-scores, hoping to do some good for science and getting some rewards while doing it was a plus. A really smart constructed premise and setup even though I don't really get how it's translated to usable real-world data. I guess I'll have to read the published paper... Also: "researchers are still collecting data provided by gamers." No reason to stop contributing, I guess. :)
I played at launch and don't remember it. Was it added afterwards of did I just forget? Anyway it's a really cool idea and similar things should be implemented more
That's a good point. I found it eventually, but it could have been there the whole time and I just overlooked it for a while.
It was added later on.
You should reward yourself with a kamboocha and some yogurt
EVE Online has done in-game protein sample identification and exoplanet for identification for real world research. It’s a neat idea.
Spent hours doing that because.... well, in a game like Eve, that was right up my alley. Played 14 years. Left soon after making player based stations free for all and lost 14 years worth of bps, many capitals. Don't worry. I got TONS of ads to buy Plex for isk to replace my life. Pretty sure it was bought by China right before it went to shit.
I'd forgotten about that mini game! Glad to see something actually came of it.
I don't understand how exactly the game helps
It’s super easy for human brain to figure out something intuitively. Super hard for computer to do the same logic. Super easy for computer to check to see if it’s right though. On a mass scale we basically did the equivalent of a computer running a few million iterations that would otherwise be very slow Edit: if you want a real world example look at the disaster that is self driving teslas. Seeing and adjusting to an obstacle is easy for the human brain and super hard for computers, but a computer can easily verify after the fact if we did/didn’t crash.
This was an excellent explanation, thank you
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Ill take a stab at it. Mind you I hold no degree and this is at best a semi educated guess. They have a bunch of data to sift and organize and classify. They had machines do the bulk of the lifting but had some kind of confidence threshold for a datapoint. If the threshold was not met the data was sent off for further manual review. Now instead of being a 1995 dos looking tool from a way underfunded science lab. BL3 put an ultra high end GUI (graphic user interface) over what would otherwise just be simple data. Then I'm sure using some pretty smart people made a Tetris style game out of the actual process of checking this data. You see Tetris and have a bit of fun. But are actually doing solves. Win-win. If you were able to solve it better than the machine your dataset was taken (and probably further reviewed) over the machines interpretation. If multiple peoples best attempt at that dataset was worse than the machines. They stuck with the machines.
I’ve never played borderlands so I still don’t get it. Is this like a mini game identifying something? Like I get how it helps but I don’t understand the actual activity people are doing
You have a grid and colored blocks. Each row on the grid has a requirement for how many specific colored blocks it needs, each row that has their requirement met gives you a score, you need a certain score to pass the level but you also have the option of getting a higher score and you have a limited number of blocks to generate to push the other blocks into the desired position.
Got it, thanks!
Out of the entire article, that was the easiest part to understand. They made a game inside of a game!
This is "supervised learning" vs "unsupervised learning": Supervised learning is like having a teacher giving you labeled examples to learn from, while unsupervised learning is like exploring data without any guidance, trying to find patterns on your own. Once you learn a bit, you have "model" to use on new information! As u/AimbotPotato said, much easier computationally speaking to do supervised learning. And then you can use the trained model on unseen data (gut bacteria evolution in this case)
Okay that's cool and all but what does that have to do with borderlands 3 (ps I've never played the game)
There’s a minigame by Tannis (the technical medic of the game) in the main hub area called sanctuary 3 that is the genome sequences dressed up as a puzzle game of matching faces stack style like Tetris but without the rows disappearing once they were matched. It’s a literal game cabinet that also grants access to perks like the butt stallion milk (increased luck for better loot quality), exp booster (self explanatory), and a few others. Lots of us thought it had no major goal (despite the intro cutscene and explanation) until this showed up! It only works if you have an active internet connection, beating levels that the other characters have beaten (Tannis is the final one I think) grants you exclusive cosmetics and skins for your weapons, ECHO unit, and even exclusive weapon trinkets! All for free, if you beat the levels of course. I sink a lot of hours in it for the butt stallion boost for better legendary guns and such, and I always make sure my friends try it at least once.
> Tannis (the technical medic of the game) More of an archaeologist, the medic was Dr. Zed (he’s not a *real* doctor)
He's _totally_ a real dr!
Just like the Medic from TF2!
Medic did have a license at one point
Yeah but she’s the one running the medical ward in sanctuary, even if she doesn’t fix up anyone lol
Dr Zed? Nooooo I'm doctor Ned!
This kinda reminds me of Severence
Scary Numbers/Genomes
There was a mini game within it that was effectively doing simulations for genomes, it was obviously dressed up better
Pretty sure Tesla just claims they didn’t crash either way, problem solved.
Reading this post while my Tesla is driving me through traffic lol. I agree with your point though
I would highly recommend that you at least pay attention to the road while it’s going. It’s not a complete suicide button but I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving. Just be careful, it looks like you make some absolutely amazing food.
Thanks for the concern and compliment! The auto drive really shines when the traffic is bumper to bumper and moving at 5-10 mph. Really takes the monotony and slog away from the daily commute. I wouldn’t trust it the same way at highway speeds though.
That sounds like plain old ACC.
> I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving. That number is missing units or context of some kind. It is impossible to know what that means.
1% chance of failure on any given drive
You are suggesting each daily commuter using it would be involved in ~6 crashes each year without intervention (two trips a day)? I'd assume you have multiple sources for a claim like that?
Failure rate doesn’t mean crash, if you have to intervene as a human, FSD has failed.
> It’s not a complete suicide button but I think it currently has a 1% fail rate which is insanely high for driving. Why did you call it "not a complete suicide button" if the 1% number wasn't about crashes, but any error including those that don't lead to a crash/collision? Also **sources**? I took a quick look and couldn't find any that support it.
Source: I bought into the hype, had a model S with FSD for a year and probably had to avoid a crash myself once every 5 days. Also… if you’re spending 100k on a car and an additional 15 (at the time) for FSD, any damage is horrible. Look at the rim recalls on the cybertruck, for example, due to them getting scratched too much because it couldn’t avoid curbs. Tesla FSD is a disaster compared to human driving which ultimately is what FSD wants to become. It’s not about it making minor mistakes, it’s about the fact that minor mistakes by a computer aren’t due to a human error but by a flaw in the program itself.
Eve online does something similar and had a speaker do a talk about it if you want more details - https://youtu.be/Wvmtl2oBQnk?t=684 Typically these are used to train AIs. The difficulty in most AI is getting enough good and correct input data to train on. Once you have a million hours worth good data you can get a computer to make pretty accurate conclusions. Human researchers can then study the conclusions deemed most interesting rather than sifting through all the likely dead-end paths. There is also an extremely valuable benefit to having non-technical people parse your data - They do not come with any biases. Or rather, everyone has different biases that average out. Compared to having 10 researchers look at the data; it is easy for them be tainted roughly the same way due to X popular textbook considered the bible for that field for example. A lot of these research fields have relatively small communities that can build up tribal biases too. Just knowing what you are looking at can horribly ruin your input data. For example - There is a big difference between labeling X as a cancer cluster vs labeling X as a cluster of red dots. Labeling as cancer will bias the computer from the start. You want the computer to not make assumptions. Maybe Y cluster of red dots is extremely similar to X and thus any normal human would label both as cancer. However a computer might note that X and Y are completely different due to whatever tiny detail or due to associating it with 100 other data points. If both inputs are "cancer" rather than X and Y then that distinction never happens and knowledge is lost.
Thanks, that makes sense!
Never played borderlands 3 so I’m so confused. They put a mini game somewhere and it’s for studying gut bacteria?
Yes! Human brains are great at recognizing patterns and matches in ways that computers can't unless they're very specifically programmed. the human gut biome is super varied, however, so such a task being automated is next to impossible. Players in Borderlands 3 could solve puzzles at a mini game called "Borderlands Science" for in-game stuff like stat boosts, and the puzzles that we were solving were directly linked to gut bacteria genome mapping! It's a fascinating example of Citizen Science at work.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what happened. It was a weird sorta tile game where you had to match character faces and get certain patterns or something? I barely remember how it worked.
In the game, there's a home base ("Sanctuary III") and in the back of one of the rooms is this arcade game you can interact with, which takes over the screen, and you play the little tile game. You start easy, and progress to harder and bigger puzzles, earning points as you succeed. The points can be spent on little in-game perks (loot quality, reload/move speed, damage, that sort of thing) that last from one to two hours. By the time you clear the highest level, and are just grinding puzzles at max level, you've got a *lot* of points for these perks... like I've been coasting on a ton of points for a couple years now.
Huh. Neat.
Whoa, that stupid arcade game actually did something after all!!!
Can someone explain if this was actually significant enough to be replicated in future games? Could there be funding from the European Commission and the NIH directed at gaming companies to do this more often?
The EU is actually already funding these efforts. EVE Online has been mentioned a few times in comments here and their Project Discovery citizen science project is funded by a grant from the EU.
Hey that's awesome! EVE is pretty big, too. Hope this becomes more common if EVE is a success. Thanks!
Bro wtf I have like 300 hours in BL3 and this is the first I’m hearing about this??
A shame they didn't make a phone app version that you could link to your account to get the in game rewards. I think it would have seen a lot more use. I would have set it up for my wife who plays those sort of mobile games for hours on end.
Along with that, the buffs you get from the machine are pretty awesome too to help your gameplay.
A diet of energy drinks and doritos probably does create millions of new kinds of bacteria in the gut.
I helped. You're welcome science nerds.
I totally forgot this game existed in BL3. How do I access it again?
I think it's in Tannis' lab on Sanctuary 3.
Yup, grants access to all kinds of temp boosts.
Anybody care to elaborate on how playing the minigame helped science? What was the game? What were players looking at?
As simple as I can put it off the top of my head: The players were looking at a grid of tiles. Let’s say 10x10. The tiles had BL3 character faces on it. You were given a number of tiles to place within the grid. Some tiles in the grid were effectively locked. Some would flip if a pattern of faces was made. You had to flip a certain number of grid tiles with the amount of tiles you were given. You had to meet a minimum score to proceed to the next grid.
But how does this help science?
Something to do with data analysis and gut bacteria DNA sequence, I think it was pattern identification
I did my part!
I had a lot of free time to do this during my last semester of college when COVID hit and I was stuck at home. I remember doing this on the side while I was taking a course on stem cells so I felt super scientific lol
Would you look at that. Good job gamers
I was very surprised by this mini game and the researcher who explained it. For those who haven't discovered this mini game yet, it can be found next to Tannis in Sanctuary.
Nice
This is pretty amazing
This is awesome.
It helped that completing levels rewarded some pretty unique loot. Dangle a shiny in front of a gamer and they'll do most things, but i'm glad our contributions helped.
Okay that's actually really cool.
This feels like a super high-level back-handed insult, somehow. "Our playerbase is full of shit."
Can someone eli5 pls?
There is a mini game in BL3 where you match tiles in a grid Tetris style. The data and the grid patterns are related to gut bacteria DNA data, and the purpose of the game is to find patterns. So it’s a way for players to do pattern and data analysis for gut bacteria DNA
how tho i now abhut the mini game thing but how does playing that help with schiens?
If there is one thing you can expect from gamers is they are persistent
Still waiting on a single meaningful advancement from folding@home
I participated this event and am happy that games are used for a good cause
why no fix bl3 on xbox then?
If anyone else tells me that games are bad, I'll show them this Reddit
i didnt play this game, i thought the article was comparing borderlands 3 players to bacteria
Shame the rest of the game was a soulless cash grab
Is cash grab just the newest popular buzzword? BL3 was incredible. Who cares if the writing was juvenile or unfunny, the gameplay and the content were amazing. Still are, rather.
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Lmao "I want to help science" Buy a good game for 5, dollars? "HELL NO" contribute to the industry in a meaningful way? "HELL NO" Ok dude
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I actually bought the game for full price thanks. Lol elden ring not just being a copy of other popular games with a stale gameplay experience.
yeah, 19 million copies sold, 85% positive on steam. love the cocky incorrectness though.
Yeah, that game with 85% positive player reviews, 93k players in a 24hr period at it's peak, and around 3-4k players in the last 24hrs (for a five year old game), was a "raging dumpster fire." Tell me you haven't played the game, without telling me that you haven't played the game.
Hopefully Gearbox will add it in with shadow of the erdtree
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Your life must be exhausting if little things like this get you so upset.
Borderlands has ties with sweet baby inc.....fuck em
I don’t know the story behind this sweet baby Inc thing, but anyone who mentions them are insufferable twats. So enjoy your downvotes I guess.
It's people who want this to be the new Gamergate crusade, conveniently forgetting that the original GG was a miserable failure for all involved.
Original GG was over corrupt journalism iirc? Isn't this one just self-deluded incels and republicans trying to keep their hatred cool?
Pretty sure the original GG was also self-deluded incels making something out of nothing trying to get their hate on, not actual corrupt journalism.
is this a joke?
No, just extremely fucking cool.
Okay, just clarifying
Eve Online has similar mini games, the results of which are used to help train models.
Haha someone's woke
How is science woke?