ichthyoid

It isn't the first time this has happened.

I remember that day—the 18th of September, 2011—sitting at a desk too small for comfort, waiting for my Cognitive Psychology professor to show up so the class could get started. Classmates milled about, and my friend Paul was talking my ear off about something I didn't really care about. It had been a longer wait than usual, but nothing out of the ordinary. Just time to pass until the next lecture.

Then, he walked in, sided by his racing cycle, as per usual. My professor was a cranky old bastard, but his rudeness is probably what kept the class entertaining. In the middle of lecturing us on neural nets and cognitive theories, he was prone to sudden neurotic bursts of annoyed and cynical analyses of every topic imaginable, from politics and science to his hatred of having to cycle next to inane drivers.

This time, as he strode in, and the rest of the class quieted down or settled into their seats, he began with, “Did you all hear the news? Gamers are about to save the world.”

We stared, fascinated, as he explained that gamers had solved a molecular problem that had stumped scientists for more than a decade. This particular puzzle challenged scientists in designing a cure for the HIV/AIDS virus. So in order to solve this problem, scientists crowdsourced gamers through a game called Foldit, which pitted more than 200,000 players against each other in a competition to get the most elegant solution possible to help stop the virus in its tracks.

Gamers did it within 10 days.

To this day, I still don't know why this wasn't national headlining news. But I do remember feeling like the solution to all the world's problems had been discovered. The ability of people to come together, competing against each other, in order to come up with the best solution—in other words, free-market competition—had produced a solution to a virus that haunted western society ever since Magic Johnson told the world he had contracted it.

Decentralized problem solving is, of course, not a new subject. And as this blog is on Coil, it's obvious that I believe very much in decentralization as a solution to many of today's problems, including those in the financial world. After all, Bitcoin (and blockchain) was invented to basically give a middle finger to the big central banks and financial institutions across the world.

Today, with the outbreak of COVID-19, a strain of coronavirus which began in Wuhan, China, and has spread to almost all of the rest of the world, could we do it again?

Nvidia is already calling gamers with GPUs to help give more compute power towards solving the present pandemic. By hooking our GPUs up to a global network, they can help with the massive computational crunching required for this kind of research. This style of networking has existed for a while now, all the back to when the PS3 was co-opted to assist with different research tasks.

So right now, if you want to help the world out with fighting COVID-19, and have a gaming rig, this is the best way to get started.

But maybe soon, gamers will be called upon to more actively participate in solving the problem of global pandemics. My hope is, if it is necessary, it will be sooner, rather than a decade later.

Header Image credit goes to Unsplash.