Iceland is a beautiful country but also a special place for citizen science video games. Reykjavik is the home of CCP games, the developer of Eve Online. Eve Online was the first AAA video game to host a citizen science activity: Project Discovery. Since 2016,...
In the last post, we talked about how we can get insights from our data. But what if you can "borrow" a successful strategy from the players, and systematize it into some kind of function to use in other puzzles. Is it possible? The answer...
Throughout the past year, we’ve been collecting and analyzing millions of solutions submitted by the player base. We have already made a post that examines how the player solutions help us create sequences that differ from current algorithms, and how much diversity the solutions have....
In our past blog posts, we have focused primarily on the puzzle results received from players, and how we use that data to improve this alignment. Today we will be delving into the other half of the process, ensuring we're producing puzzles which players can...
While we are pursuing our analysis of the tens of millions of solutions submitted by Borderlands 3 and Eve Online communities, we do in this post a recap of various announces made last weeks. We have been active on many fronts. We participated to several...
In past blog posts, we have shown snippets of our analysis pipeline and some data samples, and as we are now approaching the step of showing results, we would like to share a peek at the kind of results we are looking for. Obviously, we...
Over the last few months, the Borderlands Science team has made some significant progress crunching the data collected from the puzzles solved by the players. The goal here is to convert puzzle solutions from the players, which are slight modifications of an initial computer-generated sequence alignment of bacterial genetic...
In a previous blog post (see July), we described the task of sequence alignments as trying to match the similar regions between genes of different organisms to understand better what corresponds to what, and characterize how they mutated away from their common ancestors. We also discussed...
In this post, we shed a light on the origin and conception of Borderlands Science. Ten year ago, we launched our first citizen science game, Phylo DNA Puzzles, an online casual puzzle game that can be freely played at http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca. As Borderlands Science, the solutions collected...
In a previous blog post, we mentioned that the core of optimizing DNA sequence alignment was finding a reasonable trade off between maximizing the number of nucleotides that are correctly aligned, and minimizing the number of gaps. The goal of the alignment of two sequences...