Cancer Research UK has released a free game for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices that should help research into breast cancer immeasurably. While you play Play to Cure: Genes in Space you will be carrying out vital
Cancer Research UK has released a free game for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices that should help research into breast cancer immeasurably. While you play Play to Cure: Genes in Space you will be carrying out vital research that would take more man hours than is currently possible for the charity's scientists. And you won't even realise it.
The game was developed during a 48-hour Cancer Research UK Game Jam, where programmers and designers from Amazon, Facebook, Google, City University, Omnisoft and the charity itself combined to create, from scratch, a mobile app that is fun to play yet uses methods for you to aid research directly. The space flight game devised uses actual gene data as backdrops of a fictitious material that must be collected.
Before each mission, you have to plot your course through a map in order to fly and collect "element alpha" where it is most dense. This map is actually an image of a tiny part of gene data and by drawing the path through the dense areas on the map, you help analyse that specific piece of data while ensuring that you will be collecting the most amount of the element and therefore gaining credits to power up your ship. That analysis is then sent back to a remote server which collates all players' responses. Computers then compare all of the paths drawn for specific maps and it builds an accurate representation for that specific piece of genetic data. Gene defects could then be found and studied.
At the centre of the scientific research is a fun game. As well as having to navigate through the element alpha fields, it also throws asteroids at you to shoot - which are not part of the research. And upgrading your ship means you get to beat harder missions as they appear the more you level up as a player.
"Our researchers have huge amount of data and they are really struggling to get through that data as quickly as they like, and a lot of this data needs to be analysed by t