There are a lot of people out there who think that playing games is a waste of time. Well, now they’re definitely wrong, because with Borderlands 3 Science you can actively take part in removing errors from DNA data compiled by computers. They might be clever, but they’ll take a few years before they can surpass our intelligence.
As you can see, Borderlands 3 Science is a brand new arcade game in Sanctuary 3, which is the ship that you’ll be flying around in when playing the campaign. You can load up Borderlands 3 right now and start playing the game, and you’ll be helping to create open source information that scientists can use to compile other DNA data into something useful.
I think that’s it’s brilliant that we finally have a genuine way to help the wider world by playing games. Yes, it may be through a small arcade game, but that small arcade game earns you in-game currency, so why not give it a few spins?
The gist of what you’re doing is untangling the spiders web that a supercomputer has output when given raw DNA data. It’s been compiled, but because computers aren’t quite smart enough to understand how to compile the absurd amount of information within our cells, they need some help. Borderlands 3 Science has been designed to present the algorithmic issue as a puzzle, which we get to solve as a minigame in Borderlands 3.
Not every puzzle can be solved, that’s part of the wider issue that the scientific community faces. But by taking part in this game and solving these puzzles, we’re helping scientists put together an algorithm that they can use moving forward. That algorithm will help them analyse data much faster, and could lead to some seriously significant discoveries, as long as we get through all of these puzzles. With the Borderlands 3 community being as big as it is though, I don’t see that being an issue at all.
It’s not directly related to the coronavirus (COVID-19), but I’m sure that better algorithms would also help with the current pandemic. Let’s all work together on this one, and earn some fabulous cosmetics while we’re at it.