With NASA recently announcing the discovery of 7 Earth-sized exoplanets (planets that are outside of our solar system), it is clear that there are still a ton of other planets out there in the universe that we have yet to discover. So much so that the developer of EVE Online, CCP Games, has announced that they’ll be helping to crowdsource the search for exoplanets.Given that the game is space-based and is rather complex in terms of its politics, economy, and so on, it almost makes perfect sense for them to do this. According to the announcement, “Within EVE’s virtual universe, players will interact with real-world astronomical data provided by the University of Geneva through a fully integrated part of the EVE Online game experience called Project Discovery. Once enough players reach comparative consensus on classification of the data, it will be sent back to the University of Geneva for use in refining the search for exoplanets.”
Basically it sounds like real-world data will be used in the game itself, so while players play the game, they’ll be able to interact and interpret the data, which will then be sent back to the scientists to help them with their search for new exoplanets. Whether or not this will be successful remains to be seen, but this isn’t the first time something like this has been done.
A previous iteration of Project Discovery about the classifications of human cells proved to be very successful and had great results, so it is possible that the same could be achieved here with this particular iteration.
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