GEV Education

Scales on the wing of a Butterfly.

Gaming Your Way Through a Relativistic Universe

Remember in Super Mario Brothers, how the music and time would speed up when you started running low on the clock? Well, here’s a new level of video game time-freakiness, all about relativity. 

Strange things happen to our perception of the universe when we travel close to the speed of light (you know, if we could travel close to the speed of light). Special relativity, as worked out by Einstein and others, gives us plenty of weirdness when it comes to our perception of time and distance at those extreme speeds. MIT’s Game Lab has developed a game that simulates that experience. It’s called A Slower Speed of Light.

The closer we get to the speed of light, time slows down for us relative to someone watching us (“time dilation”), light shifts to red and blue, and the lengths of things contract in the direction we are moving. Weirded out yet? Ethan Siegel has a pretty good explanation of all those strange effects.

In the game, the object is to collect these orbs. As you grab each one, the speed of light slows down a bit. That means that you get closer and closer to traveling at the speed of light, and the game shifts the visuals and your movement to give you an idea of what that might feel like. It is not unlike a relativistic drug trip.

The game is available for Mac and PC. Pause the Halo and give relativity a whirl. It’s a video game that Einstein would have approved of!

Will we appeal to the crystals and the stars or to our minds?

Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should. 

The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past. 

“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”

“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”

And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.

So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!