A few weeks ago, I learned that a new game called "Foldit," developed by researchers at the University of Washington, could be useful in developing a cure for the coronavirus Covid-19. Essentially, players solve a puzzle by folding a protein chain into a new shape, changing the protein's function. Researchers can then experiment with the folded protein to determine its usefulness in the real world.

If this game doesn't appeal to you, but you happen to be sitting next to an expensive, powerful PC and not actually doing anything, why not let the PC do the task?

With Foldit you have to work to get on the leaderboard, but with Folding@home you can make your PC work Folding@home is a distributed computing project founded by Stanford University in 2000, and is a corona virus pandemic.

The basic scheme is that protein data is divided into work units, which are automatically downloaded by the Folding software; the PCs analyze the data until the work unit is completed, and the results are uploaded to the server. A new unit of work is downloaded and the process begins again. An analogy would be Team Fortress 2, which is very slow, has only bots, and the whole world is playing the same game.

You can fold alone (and kudos to you for doing your part), but being part of a team like the PC Gamer Folding@home Team always makes this stuff more fun. While the setup process may seem a bit intimidating, it is actually quite simple and completely automated, although once you start folding, you can tweak various settings, such as how much processing power you want to devote to it and whether you want it to run while you are using your PC.

If you run into any problems with Folding@home, have any questions, or just want to chat, the PC Gamer forum thread linked above will be helpful. the Folding website is struggling a bit at the moment, but we're working on getting it Once resolved, you'll be able to follow the team's progress here.

A summary of esports conventions and other gaming events affected by the coronavirus outbreak can be found here; for more information on the Covid-19 coronavirus, visit the North American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, or the World Health Organization .

When the protein folds, it looks like this.