Hi all,
My name is Annie Chen, and I am a Ph.D. student in information science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
I am interested in working on the Cure, and I see that Karthik has already got quite a start on getting set up! I'm sure it will be helpful to me to follow his lead.
Right now, though, I have a few big picture questions. I am trying to understand The Cure more from an interaction and crowdsourcing point of view. Here are my questions:
1. It seems that people are supposed to read the text to select genes. If that is true, do the genes get selected preferentially because of the formatting of the text? It seems that it might be good to bring more information in here, e.g. semantic linking of ontologies etc.
2. The first question is really leading to a broader question for me of what is going on in the head of the player. What do we want him or her to be thinking about to pick the right gene? (I know he's trying to beat Barney -- but I meant how is he going to come up with the optimal solution that will lead to the best configuration, which is what we're trying to get out of this...)
3. Just curious if I wanted to see transcript logs of past games, whether you all would be interested in showing me?:) (Again, the goal is to get in the mind of the player.) Of course, since we are trying to match player actions => game result, I would be interested in not just actions, but the resulting configurations. I realize that that's still leaving out part of the puzzle, since the way the game's written right now, there are configurations that are not likely ever to get picked, right?
Anyways, I know I'm probably going too far in a direction you all probably don't want to dig in, since you're talking about implementation, and what I am really still thinking about is overall design...
Thanks,
Annie