Folding Forum

If I may ask, what are the papers that are currently undergoing peer review?

Edit: Sorry, looks like I had to post this under "science" forum

Edit by Mod: Topic moved.
-b

Are you talking about in general or relating to a specific announcement by PG?

Yes, in general. I am just very curious to know what are the latest breakthroughs/results (even though they might be proven invalid by review).
Abstracts or summaries would suffice. Or at least the paper title

It's generally considered to be bad form to talk about unpublished results publicly in the scientific community and I generally agree with that. There's been several cases where people made a big splash in the press, etc, only to later find that their work was knocked down in peer review. Since people are watching FAH pretty closely, I want to be on the conservative side and only talk about results post peer review.

With that said, I'm very sympathetic to your wanting to know. Moreover, it's always the work that we're just about to publish which is the most exciting for us, since published work is usually a year old or more.

I have a question as well: is the amount of papers you guys are writing rising? And how is the importance (if you understand what I mean?) of these new papers?

By importance I mean, are the discoveries in new papers bigger and more important than those of the last few years?

By importance I mean, are the discoveries in new papers bigger and more important than those of the last few years?

OK, you know you are asking for a Nostradamus prediction of the future, right?

Understanding, and information tends to grow in a linear fashion for a great long period of time.

What you are asking is for a prediction of the "Black swan" events; The rare break-through, (novel application) of existing knowledge in a way that leads to a sudden break from the predictable. That's why they call them "discoveries" right? If you knew what you would do, it would be called destinations, or confirmations, Right?

What you are asking is "When will the science be applied in a way that significantly alters the standard of living of the average person?"
This is very hard to predict.

History is filled with hundreds of examples.

In my mind there are two ways to look Folding@home 'progress'.

The first is the science output; the papers written, the discoveries made, the steps closer to understanding the solutions/cures to diseases that F@H aims to understand. Depending on your method of measurement, you could measure this in paper output, or the impact factor of the journal that each paper appears in, or perhaps a list of diseases solved. But those might not be the best ways to measure success, or rate of success.

The second are the advances folding is having at the transistor level, that is the progress that is being made in our ability to accurately simulate these proteins in a massively distributed way. These successes could be seen as clients evolved, cores released CPU, # of folders or PFlops. Again, these might not be the best way to measure success or rate of success.

Everyone is going to have different ideas as to whether one scientific advance is 'bigger and more important' than another, but I would suggest that progress is the continued evolution of our ability to fold proteins and chipping away at the pieces of the puzzle.

k1wi wrote:The second are the advances folding is having at the transistor level, that is the progress that is being made in our ability to accurately simulate these proteins in a massively distributed way. These successes could be seen as clients evolved, cores released CPU, # of folders or PFlops. Again, these might not be the best way to measure success or rate of success.

Everyone is going to have different ideas as to whether one scientific advance is 'bigger and more important' than another, but I would suggest that progress is the continued evolution of our ability to fold proteins and chipping away at the pieces of the puzzle.

There is yet another way to look at FAH progress.

Researchers have been folding (as you put it) "at the transistor level" for years and there has been constant progress in simulation methodology and in our ability to simulate proteins. Many researchers have run their simulations on computers purchased by their University or their company. The last phrase of your sentence, however, is also important: "... in a massively distributed way."

Are more universities adopting a Distributed Computing approach to protein simulation? (I think so.) Are more private companies adopting a Distributed Computing approach to protein simulation? (Perhaps, but I don't particularly care. I don't choose to allow them to make a profit off of my donations.)