March 10, 2016 / by attila / In events , news

D-day of Project Discovery

These were some crazy days…

About two years ago on a balcony in Geneva with a friend we had this idea of integrating real life science into major videogames. At that point it was just a distant dream. Yesterday the first implementation - Project Discovery - was launched on the EVE Online Tranquility servers, and we still have a hard time to believe that this dream is actually a reality from now on. Thank you for all who has participated in this amazing journey, thank you for all the encouraging words, all the support, all the help. This is an effort of many people - and all of us are very proud that the launch day has arrived.

This is the first time ever that a serious game is incorporated in a major videogame. It is definitely gaming history, but also citizen science history. And we hope that there will be many new implementations in many other videogames. We hope that we can show the industry that this is something worth the effort and energy. As Andie Nordgren, executive producer of EVE Online put it: “We hope our example sets the stage for many other successful collaborations between science and gaming to come.” We couldn’t agree more. So don’t hesitate to contact us and integrate MMOS API with your games if you want to participate in real life science.

And a huge thank you goes out to all of you who gave it a try yesterday. The last day was about to keep the servers alive - as you guys really gave your best attempt to destroy them, raising PvP to a brand new level - MMOS servers vs. capsuleers. We suffered some losses, got even podded a couple of times - but we are back! We had some outages - we had to upgrade the DB and the storage - but finally we seem to be more or less stable. So after this we have some time to crunch data - that I am sure everybody is super interested in.

Quantity

First of all 463.936 classifications! Let me put it down again: four hundred sixty-three thousand nine hundred thirty-six classifications. Amazing achievement - congratulations to all. The per minute classification number peaked at around 800!!

A number like this was something that only came up in our wildest dreams. And the fact that we couldn’t pass the half-million limit is really on us with almost 4 hours of downtime of the service.

15.154 capsuleers gave a try to Project Discovery and got through the tutorial phase. 6.828 got even through the training phase: it is important, because without completing the training phase you can’t contribute to the actual research.

Quality

Now let’s look at the quality a bit. The best and quickest-to-obtain metric is your accuracy rating.

The charts shows rounded values and is slightly skewed to the above 50% region. 4.079 players have a score above 50%, which is almost 60%. The first three capsuleers in the accuracy rating game:

• 98.1991% with 1.704 classifications - name: ??
• 96.4843% with 1.137 classifications - name: ??
• 92.7263% with 1.193 classifications - name: ??

We don’t have the names nor the EVE Online ids, but we’ll send the ids to CCP - and they can track back to capsuleer names. o7

Quantity & Quality

After all these teasers let’s look at what you have achieved in the first day of Project Discovery.

So, are you ready?

Sure?

Let’s wait no longer then.

Together on the first day you have solved exactly 14.500 tasks! Chapeau! - as the French say. Or o7 as everybody else. This is really amazing. The tasks got solved with an average of 14 classifications.

We are super happy with the results here at MMOS. And you definitely made some happy scientists - I just called them this morning and explicitly asked them ‘Are you happy?’ - they asked around in the lab and reached their consensus surprisingly quickly: ‘Yes. We are very happy!’

As for the results - it is hard for us to evaluate the validity of the data for multiple reasons. But we’ll pass it on ASAP to the Human Protein Atlas team and I think they’ll come back with some super interesting data in the following days.

And finally two images.

The first one is the chart of the bloodbath of Project Discovery

The second is a small peek into my mobile office from yesterday above the St Lawrence river near Montréal trying to keep MMOS servers alive during the battle.