EVE Online: Project Discovery Now Live

An interesting update is taking place on EVE Online, as CCP Games (in cooperation with MMOS and Human Protein Atlas) has announced Project Discovery is now live and bringing a completely unique experience to the massively popular MMO.

https://youtu.be/JXHV2MMZmQw

Project Discovery was first announced back in 2015 at the EVE Fanfest as a sort of game-within-a-game which utilizes the assistance of players in order to help classify proteins from a massive database. This assistance will aid scientists in understanding the different protein functions in human cells, and players who participate will receive various in-game rewards.

“We were approached by MMOS to see if we could leverage the incredible human capital of EVE player intellect to contribute to scientific research and we were immediately thrilled at the prospect.” said EVE Online Executive Producer Andie Nordgren, “To see it finally get out of a very successful testing stage and into the hands of hundreds of thousands of players worldwide is a proud milestone for us. We hope our example sets the stage for many other successful collaborations between science and gaming to come.”

The process of identifying proteins from such a huge collection of data –there’s over 13 million images –  would be a daunting task for even a larger sized research team. By using the hundreds of thousands of EVE Online players, the hope is to cut that time so that scientists may more quickly understand all the proteins our DNA is coding for, and so better comprehend their function as well as their relation and reaction to disease.

Apparently non-experts will be able to learn the classifying process fairly quickly via minimal, example-based training such as annotating images where anomalies are present; classifying images into various categories; or classifying different protein patterns from cell images into different category structures belonging to the nucleus, cytoplasm, and periphery of the cell in question.

Project Discovery is done in cooperation with the Human Protein Atlas, whose goal is to create a sort of map where proteins can be identified not only in different cells, but in different organs as well. The player is ‘recruited’ by Professor Emma Lundberg of the Sisters of Eve, who will also provide the player with a tutorial on how to identify different patterns. For every task completed, the Sisters of Eve will give a reward and increase the player’s Project Discovery rank.

There is no prerequisite or requirement for contributing, so both new and veteran players can participate if they’d like to. However, if they’d prefer to simply explore the universe without taking part in the project, that’s viable too.

There are controls in place to validate the crowd-sourced results via consensus amongst other methods, and the Sisters of Eve have been included to the loyalty points store and so offer various items such as unique clothing as well as a new type of booster.

In addition to Project Discovery going live there were a host of other updates and changes made, such as

• Increased NPC activity within the Drifter wormholes,
• The UI bracket being animated when a target is destroyed,
• The station service locations for the Amarr and Minmatar Outposts being updated,
• Five new legal consumable (without penalty) boosters available from the Drifter Hive wormhole systems,
• New Stasis Grappler Modules,
• And a new round of Module Tiericide being released, which will bring changes and improvements to hundreds of other modules.

The full list of patch notes can be found here, and for a more in-depth look at Project Discovery, check out the main website.

Source: CCP Games Press Release

Trailer via EVE Online: Flight Academy, YouTube