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"Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists"

Drafting genisuses from the online gaming community was already being done when SGU's pilot was written. That's where the idea for Eli came from.

I only know this because I too scoffed at the idea of someone getting their dream job through gaming and someone threw that fact in my face.
 
Well, as the article says, it needed an entire team of players, and the problem wasn't THAT huge.

Stargate always went nuts with single persons with the intelligence and memory capacity of 100 scientists combined. And that's utter shyte.
 
Not necessarily.
Even in real life, there have been cases of humans who have highly developed memory for example and intelligence... though the latter probably cannot be measured so callously as people like to think because 'intelligence' varies from person to person and can be defined in a variety of ways.
Just how smart a person is can depend from a variety of information they have and the ability to 'connect' the said info in their brains along with other abilities - but like I said, it is highly subjective.

The case with using players for solving complex issues is a simple case that can demonstrate how academically educated individuals or 'accredited' scientists don't always know best.
I've met extremely intelligent individuals who can put so called 'scientists' to shame, but they either chose not to be a part of those circles, or are never given a chance to show their 'talents' (and even if they did, one has to remember that challenging pre-established notions is not always accepted - in fact, in most cases, they are laughed off).
 
Elis, Rushs and McKays don't exist in the real world. Nobody is that intelligent.


It's the House M.D. effect. They never ever have to consult a book or article on a disease, they make their diagnosis solely based on their memories and they know everything. And that's pure TV/film-bullshittery.
 
There are people who can remember every single event in their life with perfect detail, it's a mental condition. It's not impossible, just highly, highly unlikely.
 
Technically, it's theorized that memory is nearly limitless and it's just a matter of encoding/recalling memories that determines what we remember.
 
These gamers were playing a specialized game to solve this problem, not an MMORPG like Eli. The Stargate Universe scenario is still ludicrous.
 
The MMORPG was a specialized game to solve the problem. That was the reason for it's existence.
 
I'm not sure what one has to do with the other. The game they used for the playback was actually Stargate Worlds, which has since gone under.
 
All I'm saying is that online games used to solve scientific problems don't look like World of Warcraft (or Stargate Worlds, which is similar). There's a reason they went with that look on Stargate Unitverse, besides the attempt at a merchandising tie-in, and it's geek wish fulfillment.
 
Harvey said:
All I'm saying is that online games used to solve scientific problems don't look like World of Warcraft (or Stargate Worlds, which is similar). There's a reason they went with that look on Stargate Unitverse, besides the attempt at a merchandising tie-in, and it's geek wish fulfillment.
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Well yeah, of course. But you said it was 'ludicrous' though, and as far as sci-fi goes, given the article, this isn't really all that ludicrous at all, relatively speaking...
 
I'm no SGU fan...I couldn't make it past the pilot, BUT the issue of Eli's ability to solve the puzzle isn't the objection people make it out to be.

Just like Jeff Goldblum's character in ID4, Eli was a genius attendee of a major technical college. (This was established in both films in the dialogue). Jeff's character dropped out of the scientific rat-race, and Eli had to withdraw from school because of money issues related to his mother's health condition.
 
I thought Eli dropped out because he simply wasn't putting any effort into school. As in he was smart, just not motivated.
 
*meh* it's just a homology model. Hardly a great unsolved mystery of the ages:techman:

Structural Biologists build those by hand all the time for phasing in X-Ray crystallography, the fact that they out-solved Rosetta (a program for semi-automatically predicting/designing novel protein structures) isn't really all that impressive.
 
Ian Keldon said:
The Wormhole said:
I thought Eli dropped out because he simply wasn't putting any effort into school. As in he was smart, just not motivated.
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That wasn't my impression, based solely on the pilot. Did they elaborate on his motivations later on?
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Not exactly, but his mother did comment that Eli despite being quite intelligent never applied himself, resulting in him dropping out of school. Also, an episode showed a flashback of his mother getting after him to get a job, noting he skipped a job interview he had sceheduled.
 
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