Players of Eve Online have completed over 47 million tasks to aid researchers in gathering Coronavirus data.
In a significant moment in gaming history, over 171,000 EVE Online players have completed 47 million mini-game tasks to aid researchers in understanding the Coronavirus.
According to the BBC, this equates to 36 years of categorizing cells. So you can see why this is major news for researchers.
In June scientists at McGill University’s School of Computer Science had announced the return of Project Discovery, a minigame that helps them with data gathering. Project Discovery had previously helped scientists to study how human cells are built and to help identify exoplanets.
This time Project Discovery has helped researching the Coronavirus by mapping groups of cell populations in-game.
The EVE Online players simply had to draw polygons around cell clusters.
According to EVE Online’s lead producer David Ecker, it didn’t take much to get players interested in the Mini-Game in question.
“We gamified this quite a bit. There’s incentives for people to do it … but it’s also just the heart and soul of our community, as well. These are things that our people really enjoy, and this really is for the greater good.”
When EVE Online players were interviewed by the BBC they said that the minigame not only made them feel like they could help out with something important from the comfort of their own home but that it made the science behind something that affects so many people alot more approachable.
In a blogpost on the EVE Online website they said:
“By participating in Project Discovery you will be helping HPA to analyze new protein images to expand their database and in turn contributing to the wellbeing of future patients being treated around the world.
Many endeavours in scientific research require substantial amounts of human processing on enormous sets of data. Examples of such processing include annotating images to indicate where anomalies are present (e.g., finding stars in an image of the night sky) or classifying images into one of several categories (e.g., to identify which proteins are present in an image of a cell). Performing such tasks computationally is very difficult, but non-experts can learn to do so proficiently with only minimal, example-based training.”
If you feel you would like to be a part of Project Discovery and contribute to science, you can go to EVE Online’s website or to their page dedicated to Project Discovery itself.
This project is an awesome way for people around the world to be involved in a major scientific discovery from the comfort of their homes.