What is this F@H?
- Thread starter DKdeadly
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magicman
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DKdeadly, if you're interested, I strongly encourage you to join our team, you'd be able to contribute an awful lot to the cause. And if you have any questions, here's the link to the discussion thread, where you can clarify any points that aren't clear from the above link. 
http://www.computerforum.com/12993-folding-home-cf-official-discussion-thread.html
http://www.computerforum.com/12993-folding-home-cf-official-discussion-thread.html
dragon2309
P.I Dragon
You download a client application that retrieves "cores" from the stanford servers, these cores contain protien strands and yourcomputer "folds" them in different ways to see and record how different protien strands react under different circumstances. Its simply distributed computing to help understand how diseases etc are made/cured when protiens go wrong.
Thats very hard to say, there have of course been lots of medical breakthroughs over the years, it would be impossible to say whether or not these would have happened or not without people like us and the millions of others folding protien strands. All that really matters is that your helping and you are donating something which doesnt directly cost you for the good of medical research and the aid of other people that might some-day need it.
It costs nothign and you would be helping millions upon millions of people worldwide.
dragon
magicman
VIP Member
Scientific advances are generally slow, as research has to follow the scientific process and go through peer review processes. However, the tools now available to scientists because of the folding@home program allow for a new direction of research, and that has to be a good thing. Many journal articles have been published based entirely on the results of folding@home, the latest of which is here. It's easy to expect quick solutions to complex problems because of a new tool at the disposal of scientists. Folding@home provides the hammer and chisel, it's the scientists that must scultp the masterpeice. But if it weren't for the good will of all the participants of folding@home, all the scientists would have to work with is a hammer - metaphorically speaking...
All the information you need is in the thread that was linked above - this thread.
Hmmm. Interesting. Forgive me for being skeptical. I can only recall the SETI@home debacle, where they took advantage of thousands of computers to search for something that doesn't exist, they found no proof of existing, and they wasted a shitload of bandwidth and computing power proving absolutely nothing.
So, every time I hear of a distributed computing venture, I get leary.
So, every time I hear of a distributed computing venture, I get leary.
magicman
VIP Member
I can see your point, when this team was first set up, SETI@Home was very briefly discussed as a dist. comp. alternative, then just as quickly dismissed as being less "immediately applicable" than F@H.
Why don't you take the plunge and join in yourself? If you're not convinced within 30 days, you'll get a full refund of your clock cycles...
Actually it would be easy to say, There have been found cures for things, Weather F@H helped any of it would be anwsered by the simple question of, Did they use any of the rereash provided by F@H, as far as i know, and as far as 6 months ago at least, Nothing has been found out by F@H that i could find out.
You would only be helping millons if a cure was actually found using it.
magicman
VIP Member
Anybody who has studied a subject to degree level or beyond and has a grasp of academic science, will understand that f@h is doing a lot of good, whether the 'cure' that people are looking for is obtained within the first few years of the project or not. These are very complex problems, and the path to a cure is not a straight one. But you can't dismiss the project out of hand, because the path needs to be trod nonetheless.
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