Distributed-thinking projects

The open availability of data is made all the more appealing to many by the idea of the associated problems.

The idea of scavenging CPU cycles from home computers is now well embedded in popular culture following the success of efforts like SETI@home. More recently, researchers created the same kind of home computing software to do computationally time-consuming protein folding problems. Surprisingly, some volunteers fed back to the project that they thought they could solve the folding problems quicker/better than the computer. This led to the creation of the FoldIt program - and people took on the challenge.

Such projects are now called distributed-thinking projects and their numbers are growing.

Read this Nature article for more: Citizen Science: People Power