A (Crazy?) Idea For Getting FAH To A Million Participants

[Alan C. Lawhon]

This is not well developed or well thought out - it's just something that occurred to me in a flash ...

The Problem: Despite FAH being "the world's largest distributed computing project" (according to Wikipedia), it irks me that we seem to be stuck in the 160-170 thousand donor/volunteer range. This is good, but it is also frustrating as it seems we could do much better with regard to attracting new volunteers and new donors.

As Dr. Pande has noted in this video: https://folding.stanford.edu/home/video ... ls-of-fah/ there are a billion computers in the world. (I'm not good at math, but I think that's a thousand million ...) Thus far, we collectively have been unable to attract even one-tenth of one percent of that one billion number. Around the 53:00 minute mark of the above presentation, Dr. Pande notes a major "exa-flop simulation project" involving the p53 tumor suppressor protein. The only thing holding back this grand simulation is the lack of computing power - in other words the insufficient number of volunteer donors. I have tried to persuade friends and associates to join FAH, but with limited success. I'm sure many of you have also tried to persuade your friends and acquaintances to donate their unused computer cycles. For whatever reasons, we're collectively having trouble getting anywhere close to that magical one-million donor threshold. So, what to do?

It appears that many [potential] donors - who could be participating - are simply not motivated (or not interested) in protein folding and FAH. So the question is: How do we get people interested? I have a "crazy" idea - but it's an idea that might just work ...

The Solution: I have noticed that quite a number of people buy lottery tickets - despite the fact that the odds of any one person winning the Powerball lottery are something on the order of 1 in 175,000,000. The idea I have is a variation on winning the lottery - the only difference being that the odds of one "lucky" individual winning a million dollars are much better than 1 in 175,000,000. Here's one idea for how it might work.

Either through crowd funding or persuading a wealthy individual to put up the $1,000,000.00 grand prize, we sponsor a contest. You don't have to buy a lottery ticket or pay any kind of "entry fee" in order to be eligible for the grand prize. All you have to do is join FAH as a volunteer participant, download the software, and start folding. In order to be eligible for the grand prize, your donated computer must crunch work units, continuously, for a minimum of one year. (The contest would begin on a certain date, like say January 1, 2016, and run for a period of two years. This would give people plenty of time to join and participate.) At the end of the two-year period, a random drawing would take place among all eligible participants with the "winner" getting the million dollar grand prize. (A special "rule" for this contest might be that any volunteer/participant who accumulates 1,000,000 [or more] points in less than a year is automatically eligible for the grand prize. Such a rule might encourage some folks to set up multiple "folding farms" in an effort to get as many chances as possible to win the grand prize.) There might have to be a "conditional rule" - namely that the awarding of the grand prize is contingent upon a minimum of 1,000,000 donor/volunteers participating in the contest. (If we can find a wealthy patron who will agree to put up the $1,000,000.00 prize fund, that individual might insist that [at least] one million donors participate for a minimum of one year before he/she will agree to put up the money.) To really encourage participation, (if we can raise the money), we might have multiple [smaller] cash awards going to as many as ten to twenty additional winners in gradually decreasing amounts. If we could organize a contest where a minimum of 20-30 random participants are guaranteed to win [at least] $10,000.00 - with one of them guaranteed to win a cool $1,000,000.00 - that might just be the enticement that gets FAH to a million donor/volunteers - for at least a year.

I know very little about "crowd funding" and how that works, so I'm not sure if a "Protein Folding Lottery" could work that way. It seems that appeals to peoples' "good nature" and trying to interest them in participating "... for the good of mankind and fighting deadly diseases" is not working that well. We are still well short of attracting one million folders. I'm sure there are "problems" (and obstacles) with this idea ... However, if there's a way to make this work, maybe an appeal to that universal desire - the wish to "get rich quick" - will work where other appeals have failed.

I'm sure there are issues with this "crazy" idea, but here's one thing I do know: People buy lottery tickets every day - where the chance of winning is much worse than one in a million. (If we can entice one or two million new folders to join FAH for a year, Vijay can run that p53 exa-flop "grand simulation" that's currently sitting on the drawing board - and possibly several others as well.) I like to think optimistically and look for solutions. I'm sure there are "problems" with this idea - I'm not a lawyer - but I also see a lot of positives - if we can just figure out how to make this work. The only "major" drawback I see is obtaining a guaranteed prize fund. Once we have the money and all the contest rules have been finalized, running a full-page ad in various wide-circulation media announcing the contest will hopefully do the trick.

We've been successful in attracting [close to] 170,000 folders without the appeal of winning a prize. To get the number from 170,000 up to a million, we need to try something outside the box.

[Nathan_P]

Perhaps retaining existing donors would help...........

[7im]

Perhaps the communication channel to Pande Group now resided on reddit.