Playing the System: Can Puzzle Players Teach us How to Solve Hard Problems?

With nearly three billion players, video games are more popular than ever. Casual puzzle games are among the most played categories. These games capitalize on the players’ analytical and problem-solving skills. Can we leverage these abilities to teach ourselves how to solve complex combinatorial problems? In this study, we harness the collective wisdom of millions of players to tackle the classical NP-hard problem of multiple sequence alignment, relevant to many areas of biology and medicine. We show that Borderlands Science players propose solutions to multiple sequence alignment tasks that perform as well or better than standard approaches, while exploring a much larger area of the Pareto-optimal solution space. We also show the strategies of the players, although highly heterogeneous, follow a collective logic that can be mimicked with Behavioral Cloning with minimal performance loss, allowing the players’ collective wisdom to be leveraged for alignment of any sequences.