Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?

Mutalova, Renata; Sarrazin-Gendron, Roman; Cai, Eddie; Richard, Gabriel; Gheidari, Parham Ghasemloo; Caisse, Sébastien; Knight, Rob; Blanchette, Mathieu; Szantner, Attila; Waldispühl, Jérôme

doi:10.1145/3544548.3581375

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…After only 3 months, players had solved a total of 50 million of these puzzles (Waldispühl et al, 2020). Thus far, the human players were able to collectively solve complex multiple sequence alignment problems as well as or even better than the current strategies (Mutalova et al, 2023).…”

Section: Qua N T U M M Ov E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Leadership Through Citizen Science Games

Schrier

2024

J of Leadership Studies

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The current paper examines how citizen science games, or games that build knowledge and enable the crowdsourcing of tasks, enable leadership. Specifically, the paper describes how both the creators and players of these knowledge‐building games are collectively engaged in the leadership process. Players are enacting leadership through collaboration, communication, and problem solving with other players, as well as alongside the creators of these games. The games' developers are also engaged in leadership in how they are framing and enabling problem solving and other collective activities.

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Section: Qua N T U M M Ov E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Leadership Through Citizen Science Games

Schrier

2024

J of Leadership Studies

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“…I have also contributed with data analysis of player solution metrics to help contextualize Renata et al's paper on using reinforcement learning to imitate player solutions. [1] 6…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning the Game: Decoding the Differences between Novice and Expert Players in a Citizen Science Game with Millions of Players

Cai,

Sarrazin-Gendron,

Mutalova

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

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Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game

Sarrazin-Gendron,

Ghasemloo Gheidari,

Butyaev

et al. 2024

Nat Biotechnol

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Citizen science video games are designed primarily for users already inclined to contribute to science, which severely limits their accessibility for an estimated community of 3 billion gamers worldwide. We created Borderlands Science (BLS), a citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design. BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers invaluable resources to the scientific community.

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Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?

Cited by 4 publications

References 51 publications

Leadership Through Citizen Science Games

Leadership Through Citizen Science Games

Learning the Game: Decoding the Differences between Novice and Expert Players in a Citizen Science Game with Millions of Players

Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game

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