Thanks to a tip from reader yoti93, we're letting the PlayStation 3 owners know that the Stanford University's Folding@Home service has been updated to version 1.31.

Those interested in reading this update improvements will want to visit the full article. All you have to do is click the "read more" link below.

If you're male and find it a wee bit difficult to put down the controller when you're playing a video game, then the findings of a Stanford study might be able provide you with a pretty interesting reason behind it.

In a study done by Allan Reiss and his colleagues, they were able to find out that video games have a greater effect on the reward region of the brain of men than in women. Details of their study in the full article.

Here's some big news for the guys who've signed up for Standford's  and Sony's Folding@Home project. The company is sending word that registered PS3 units for this shared computing project have exceeded the one million mark.

Details regarding this matter are in the full article.

Thanks to the ginormous help afforded by Sony PlayStation 3, Stanford University's Folding@home project was eventually recognized by the Guinness World Records as the World's Most Powerful Distributed Computing network. This big achievement is thanks to the overwhelming participation of PS3 owners all around the world (QJ included).

Folding@home (also known as F@h) managed to reach the one petaflop mark on September 16 last month, while continued widespread participation of PS3 users enabled the PS3 to surpass one petaflop on September 23, not counting the input from other computers and devices.

To those who still aren't familiar about the Folding@home project, it is an application that lets PS3s and PCs participate in a distributed computing project that simulates the process of protein folding. Since the simulation of the entire process is too slow and tasking for a single computer to handle, Dr. Vijay Pande and the merry band of researchers from Stanford Project managed to create a single computing network dedicated for the sole purpose of simulating the protein folding process.

The success of the project was also thanks to the user-friendly F@h application: just let the PC or PS3 run the application while not playing any games, and just leaving the machine on when not in use. PS3 users only needed to contribute electricity to help improve mankind's well-being, so to speak.

This is not the only instance wherein the PS3 helps out the field of science. A cluster of eight PS3 units are currently working as a supercomputer replacement for Dr. Gaurav Khanna as he conducts his space research. Will the mighty PS3 and its powerful Cell processor find more ways in benefiting humanity? We'll see soon enough.

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781
Visit: QJ.Net Folding@Home
Visit: QJ's PS3 General Discussion Forum

Stanford University's Folding@home program has broken the petaflop milestone thanks to Sony's PlayStation 3. For those who don't know what a petaflop is, it is the capability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). That's the equivalent of every person on earth doing 75,000 simple math problems per second.

Folding@home was designed to simulate protein folding and perform molecular dynamics simulations. The data gathered here would be used to understand the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, mad cow, cancer, and even Cystic Fibrosis.

Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead pointed out that thanks to the PS3s and its owners who ran Folding@home, the research process on the different diseases being studied has been sped up by a decade. The president and CEO of SCEA Jack Tretton also spoke about this achievement saying that:

When we introduced PS3, we knew its incredible processing power would allow for a great deal of innovation and creativity. It's extremely rewarding to see that the scientific community has found a way to harness PS3 technology for humanitarian purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers and the Folding@home community have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

This is something that PlayStation 3 owners who have been running Folding@home should be proud of. After all, without the 600,000 gamers who registered and helped out the project, this wouldn't be possible.

Join: QJ.net Folding@Home Team: #52781

Can the Xbox 360 outperform the PlayStation 3 (PS3) when it comes to Folding@Home? We don't know for certain yet as Microsoft is yet to jump in, so to speak, but Sony Computer Entertainment America's Jack Tretton is questioning Microsoft's motives and mentioned that he'd be very disappointed if they are just seeking out good PR.

Tretton added that if big MS is indeed just trying to create a good image for itself then that is a rather shallow reasoning. And he suggested that MS might be doing this only because Sony is doing it. Tretton explained:

I think to look at it as a marketing platform is something that a company certainly wouldn't want to do. I'm certainly not insinuating that's Microsoft's motivation, but I'm not even sure how relevant it is to what we're doing. Would they be even having this conversation if we weren't doing it? I don't know.

More interestingly, Tretton went on to question as well the processing abilities of the 360 and doubts if it is capable to take part in such project. The official claimed that Stanford University is not even sure if Microsoft will be able to help them in this endeavor. According to Tretton:

I would guess that the medical community would take help from anywhere they could get it, but the commentary that I heard is that Stanford isn't sure that would help them very much. Which is odd to me because if it helped at all, it seems like they would welcome it with open arms.

It should be remembered that earlier this month, Peter Moore suggested that Microsoft is willing to join the project provided that they can "truly believe that they can in some way marshal the resources of a much larger installed base of Xbox 360 owners." In the end, Tretton lamented that he just wished MS is not trying to milk the medical community:

It's really ugly territory to get into, but let's take fighting a disease and see if we can get some credit for that. It's not a cool game to play one way or the other so I don't want to even give the impression that that's our motivation, and I'd be very disappointed if they're looking for PR value or to try to suck off some of the goodwill that we're doing.

The worldwide, seven-million gamer community of Xfire and their Debate Club will be hosting a live debate session in their fourth Xfire Debate Club: The Two-Handed Sword on April 26. This time around, the heated discussion will be bringing a varied panel of guests ranging politicians to game industry journalists and critics to contest the matter of "Censorship in Video Games."

The session, to be moderated by Stanford University's Henry Lowood, will bring together Matteo Bittanti, a researcher at Stanford University; Hal Halpin, CEO of Entertainment Consumers Association; Dennis McCauley, CEO of GamePolitics.org; Russ Pitts, Editor of The Escapist; to discuss matters regarding:

• Governments' involvement and their regulation of video games
• Game exposure to children and their consequential influence on them
• The power of "the creative license"

Frederic Descamps, senior director of marketing at Xfire, commented, "As video games become a more mainstream form of entertainment, questions regarding censorship and legislation continue to gain significance." The debate will take place at April 26, 4 p.m. EDT or 1 p.m. PDT at Xfire's debate section. You can head there through the "Read" link below. And don't forget to bookmark it!

In the wake of Sony's successful non-profit partnership with Stanford University for the Folding@Home program on the next gen PS3 videogame console, several companies have begun discussions with Sony about "possible commercial applications" for the PS3.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Masa Chatani, chief technology officer at Sony Computer Entertainment, revealed that Sony had received numerous inquiries regarding the "distributed computing" model they are using for Folding@Home.

"This kind of computing model could be used in a commercial application," Mr Chatani said. "For example, a start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilise this kind of infrastructure. We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications."

Chatani admitted that a commercial endeavour would be more difficult to launch because it would be hard to convince users to let profit-making companies use the power of their PS3s for free. According to the Financial Times, Sony is "currently studying whether it would need to offer incentives, such as free products, to persuade PS3 owners to participate" -- the answer to which is (for this writer, at least) quite obviously "Yes".

CNET News reports that Stanford University Libraries">Henry Lowood, curator of the Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries have in their collection 25,000 plus videogames. The said curator is also in charge of archiving the electronic gems.

The 25,000 games originally belonged to former Stanford student Steven Cabernetti who passed away recently. What's noteworthy about this collection is that most of the titles are still in their original shrink-wrap. The games were gifted to the Stanford Library for use in their history of science and technology collections.

Henry Lowood, together with game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky and academic researcher Matteo Bittanti and journalist Christopher Grant also came up with a list of the ten most important games of all time. The chronological list has been submitted for review and potential permanent preservation to the U.S. Library of Congress.

The ten games are: Spacewar (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), the Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

CNET has a video report of the Stanford University Library collection and can be viewed via our "read" link below.

 

Yay for saving lives indeed, Barakku (Unregistered). We can't help but feel very, very grateful (and lucky) for the overwhelming response to our invitation to you guys on PS3.QJ.net to join our Folding@Home Team. We still shake our heads in amazement every time we see the stats. There's probably only one word to describe what we feel: miraculous.

As of a few minutes ago, the whole QJ F@H team, composed of 399 members, has completed 3,642 work units (WU) of research calculations, with an average of 442 active CPUs. Among all the teams registered, QJ ranks 621 out of 57,762 - and now you know why we're still amazed. We have accumulated an aggregate of 837,391 points towards our team's grand score (ceritificates for points and WU are reproduced below).

  

As a point of comparison, lemme take you guys back to before the PS3 launch (in Japan/North America). Checking our pre-PS3 stats back then, only PCs were netted together, and the QJ F@H team was only composed of a handful of volunteer PCs. We did some good, but the stats weren't this good. What a difference a PS3 and an open invitation can make!

This isn't to set aside the efforts of our long-standing PC volunteers, though. Having been there longer, they've achieved so much through patient, hard work in the background - much like the tortoise racks up the miles one step at a time. And who knows? Perhaps our team's PS3s are carrying on follow-on research on the products of our veteran PC members. We all pull together here.

Our team. Has a certain affectionate ring to it, don't it? When we think about it before we sleep, it's like, "Damn, perhaps someone I love might one day be stricken with some dangerous disease, but by that day, we will have the knowledge to cure them." It's that thought that keeps us plugging F@H in our PS3 for as long as possible, every chance we get. I'd like to think it's the same thought that drives you guys, too.

So again, from the bottom of our sometimes-jaded, but still pleasantly surprised hearts, we thank you. Thank you for getting QJ F@H to where it is today, and tomorrow, and the days to come. They say it's hard to believe in miracles sometimes, but it's harder not to when you're looking at one on your PC screen, one work unit at a time.

[If you've got the PS3 or PC to spare, by the way, not hooked up to F@H, and are still interested in joining, by the way, the digits you're looking for are 52781. That's Team ID# 52781.]

Visit: QJ.net Folding@Home
Visit: QJ's PS3 General Discussion Forum