Topic: Official Poll for "CureCoin" has been requested by Stanford University - page 2. (Read 7323 times)

Yes, I've seen Foldit (I was one of the first bunch of people who used it upon release).

That'd be nice, because it'd be really easy for me to doctor without any focus on structure.  An accurate free energy calculation is also pretty computationally intensive as compared to a metric like Z-score or RMSD, which can be run in way less than a second.

You can reward them based on finding some local minima based on the structure that incorporates Z-score/RMSD as well as free energy, but I could also probably doctor that pretty easily and it actually poorly reflects on overall computational work.

In either case, you definitely need someone to verify the solutions afterwards --> centralization of the coin distribution is absolutely necessary (especially as the work needs to come from a central organization!).

The easiest thing to do is just to run a backend on the miner's computer that gives them administrative control, even if only on a VM, and then they can tell exactly what code is being executed.

That's a really, really bad idea [2A confinement for C-alphas] and will result in a lot of not so useful structures.  Z-score would be a way better metric for that.  This is all based on the assumption as well that you're just looking for a structure closest to what the actual structure achieved through X-ray crystallography would be if you could get it.  There are a lot of other important problems, such as dynamic ligand-receptor interactions over a time course.  Ideally any PoW system should not be pigeon-holed by a single problem but adaptive to multiple problems.

Anyway, seems like a neat idea, not sure how you'll really implement it without administrative control of your nodes, would like to be interested but already have IRL research projects spanning multiple labs (and also here on bitcointalk).

"for decades" ... that's ambitious. Curious to see what the F@H team comes up with. They should, of course, realize that POW schemes can change over the evolution of the coin (maybe another suggestion for them is for a consensus voting system to be implemented for client/POW alterations, similar to what tacotime is doing with MC2). No need to perfect it during the first iteration.

CHN is China coin... is a new alt coin that has nothing to do with this. This project is yet to come

HERE IS YOUR ANSWER

just found this in my gmail. This is from Professor Vijay Pande , here is a link to the team and lab he runs http://folding.stanford.edu/Pande/People

This is the guy who wanted to know if Bitcoin miners would be behind this concept, so i put up this poll.

From
Vijay Pande
11:53 AM (4 hours ago)
 
"Thanks.  We're thinking about how to make a consistent, reliable POW calculation which is useful for our science.  Doing a proof of concept POW is easy.  Doing something which can be consistent and around for years to decades, yet is always scientifically interesting is much trickier."


So there you have it folks. Thanks to the nice people of the bitcoin forum voting their support, we have let Professor Pande know we are indeed interested.

I hope it gets released REALLY REALLY SOON !!!!!! CANT WAIT!!!!

and not to worry all you worry warts...

i sent this to him im one of the emails

"Quick question. If this were to happen would Stanford even need the help of these people? If stanford launches it you will have to make sure you keep 1 main thing in mind. The bitcoin community loves to see projects build, and know how they work to the point they are satisfied about the safety / security of any software client they use. If you keep them informed and feed the constants updates to get excited about... you will get a huge response."

So hopefully soon they launch a project site, or join us here on the bitcoin forum.

Thanks again to everyone who voted

I feel sort of stupid for asking but how do you 'mine' CNC? Are there any pools open etc?

Well, it depends what you define as "verifiability". True, the minimum free energy structure doesn't have a 1:1 correspondence with the actual biological structure (in fact, I agree that free energy in itself is a pretty horrible metric), but similar systems have used energy as a decent ranking metric (google Foldit), and it's "the best we've got" as far as a concrete, verifiable calculation. Furthermore, computation of the free energy is far simpler than other possible metrics, whether homology-based (does this look like an evolutionarily related structure), domain-specific (does this have an appropriate # of helices, sheets, turns), etc. Thus, we can make do with free energy as a check for PoW, and I wager that the expansion of computer power for such a project will outweigh the negatives of not relying on other forms of verification. Researchers then can use these structures to then run further tests (such as domain classification, etc), which they might not be able to do if they're scheduled for indefinite amounts of compute time several months in the future (unless you're in a Nobel winning lab with a big fat NIH grant, it's tough, I've been there).

Of course, the problem is "which energy function". I suspect the F@H team is on that problem.

The bounty system that I proposed in the other thread allows for these other metrics to be slowly incorporated in the evolution of this coin (i.e. accept structures of protein XYZ only if mean C-alpha distances to reference homology structure is less than 2A.) But that will come in a future version.

/technical rant

You really can't do that with something like protein folding simulations (I would know, I've worked in the field for three years...).  In fact, most scientific problems involve calculations applied to stochastic problems where they don't necessarily know what the results will be.  The only way I can think of is to just use a ripple like system where whatever at home gives you credits based upon your solutions being provided to them.  But it's not necessarily a bad answer to this problem, it's better than folding and getting nothing but points on a leaderboard.

If opencoin just released their source code you could directly port it and then use it to make a network like ripple for your coins -- but they haven't.

Get the protein folded more than once for verification? It might help to discard floating point errors too.

Anyone have any answers to this?

Well, they could do a POS system as PPCoin where instead POW to start distributing coins they use the points u get from the work done.
And i guess they give the same work to different users so they can verify the result.

This idea doesn't make any sense.

Protein folding simulation is indeed very computationally expensive, but the results of such a simulation are not efficiently verifiable. Therefore, you cannot base a "proof of work" system on this, and the entire idea of CureCoin is meaningless.

valid point

I put 100%, on the assumption I will add it to my array of merged mined coins that all also already get 100% of my hashing power.

-MarkM-

*bump*  Also, why is this under "Alternate Cryptocurrencies"?  Okay, on the one hand CureCoin <> Bitcoin, so yeah, it's an altcoin.  But the issue - and the potential - are larger than "just another altcoin", especially if merge-mining of one sort or the other is possible.

Is there a legit way to get this poll in front of the folks who don't care about the new alt coin of the day and never come to this discussion, but might care about this?

read the main thread... look for posts by username jimhsu

he helped to paint a picture to bitcoin world from his standpoint of being in molecular biology, of how the folding work might be even harder to dupe then bitcoin work.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btc-miner-uses-massive-hashing-power-to-cure-cancer-190401

edit * also if you do manage to find a faster way to fold.. you have just created a technologically breakthrough that will save lives... so you are encouraged to try

FYI to the merge mining ideas... on my pc... somehow i can do folding@home with 55% of gpu power, then i launch cgminer, and magically i get almost the same hash rate. about 20% less. and EVEN WEIRDER YET, when i do both of these at the same time.. my card runs exactly 10 degrees C cooler... and if you really dont believe me try it yourself. if it doesnt work that way, i i could post a screen shot of it working and my settings.

This is great like it is, but fully merged mining would ofcourse be better. Because of the work being done though.. it might take a little while before someone figures out how to make it merge mine. who knows though.

I'm interested in how this would actually work?

How is the cryptographic principles maintained via the folding@home work?

Wouldn't this be open to forgery etc, as the PoW isn't secure?

Its an interesting idea. Instead of an arbitrary proof of work scheme, why not work on solving a problem that has some utility. as an example (i know its not a good one because this particular example wouldn't work but its just to convey a point) we could be attempting to solve pi. You could prove that you worked hard by discovering a previously undiscovered digit of pi (hence the proof of work) while adding something of value to the scientific community at the same time.

Same situation here; power costs where I'm at now suck big-time. However, I'd want to contribute to this project in some sort of meaningful way. Because, frankly, fuck cancer.


Also, I do like the idea to merge-mine this. That would give it quite the huge amount of initial support.

This is generally extremely poor for long term coins, but would it be better to be merge mineable with the BTC chain or another chain, and take advantage of the hashing power already available without people going to an alternate coin if we're talking about benefit for research?