The U.S. Navy wanted creative tactics to defeat the pirates, as well as ways to anticipate what a notoriously unpredictable enemy would do next. So why not throw the scenario out to the crowd in the form of a video game, effectively getting hundreds of people to run the simulation over and over and over again? You have hundreds of gamers playing through these encounters from different angles, providing far more examples to study than the real world could ever supply.

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We understand all of these words, but the sentences are giving us some difficulty.

The way that this game works is you get to play as either the pirates or the anti-pirate task force. And it's realistic down to the finest detail -- if you're on the anti-pirate side, you have to deal with "... the logistics of arming ships, the likelihood of pirate attacks and the financial, jurisdictional and temporal difficulties of military action to support commercial shipping and cruise ships." Pirate players have to come up with detailed attack plans, and anti-pirates have to work through the logistics of hostage rescue if they succeed.

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"Shit, it's boobsmcgee900!"

In some ways, it's the super-realistic, micro-managing game that hard core RTS players have been asking for since the 1980s. And you're playing alongside members of the military, there to make sure people aren't just cheating their way to victory ("What? The pirates could have aimbots!").

It's one of those ideas that is so ridiculous that it makes perfect sense. The same weaknesses in security that players notice in the game will be noticed by the pirates in real life. What you lose due to a lack of realism, you make up for with sheer volume. Oh, and the players are all doing it for free.

When you've cleared the oceans and confiscated their parrots, tell them who sent you.

So, when you play Foldit, they show you a couple of proteins (the building blocks of DNA -- the pieces of the puzzle) and you have to try and make them fit (or "fold") together, using the same "rules" by which the proteins are bonded in real life. Players are eventually going to land on the most intuitive and efficient way to fold the proteins, and that gives science a pretty damned good idea of how nature does it. Then they can program that method into their software and use it to analyze others. The combined strategies employed by the thousands of gamers create the algorithm.

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Players have already modeled an enzyme that could help cure AIDS (the final boss).

Phylo, meanwhile, works in a similar way to solve a different problem. To a player, it's a simplistic game that involves moving blocks to create rows of color. What the player may not even know is that each block actually represent bits of genetic code, and that they're helping solve a complex problem that scientists don't have the computing power to work through.

They're all too busy playing Bejeweled, obviously.

When analyzing DNA, finding bits of similar sequences is hugely important -- it tells you a lot about how that particular trait evolved. But since your genetic makeup is coded with up to 25,000 distinct genes made up of three billion base pairs, sifting through all that shit to find similar strings is next to impossible. That is, unless you dump that raw data in front of a bored gamer and say, "It's a new puzzle game! Find the similar strings and you'll get the high score!"

If you beat this level, you win the "Not Dead Yet!" achievement.

Unfortunately, the three billion hours we spend gaming isn't nearly enough -- at a TED lecture, one expert said the time needed to solve these issues is 21 billion hours a week, or seven times our current rate. So get that homework shit done so you can get to work on your games, kids. Science needs you.

And the project is a huge success, managing to digitize 20 years of The New York Times daily newspaper in just a few months, by letting Web surfers decode the hard bits. It is estimated that websites display 200 million reCAPTCHAs a day.

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Over the years, we've managed to get the word "dongs" into the NYT editorial column 17 times!

It was clear that the investors blamed them (or their components) for the accident, even though the news coverage had in no way fingered them as the culprit. The press did have some rumors about what caused the accident, but no one was implicating Thiokol above any of the other companies. It took a Washington blue ribbon commission six months to figure out that, sure enough, Morton Thiokol was responsible. It took the faceless mass of investors one day.

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Our methods of prediction involve a financial paper, a bear and wild flailing. We're all millionaires.

Experiments have been done on this from several angles, and the results are always remarkable. You remember the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (you saw it if you were watching TV in the same room as your grandmother). It was a quiz show where if you got stuck on a question, you had three options for help. You could eliminate two of the four possible answers, raising your odds to 50/50, you could phone an expert or you could ask the audience to vote on the right answer.

This gives us a unique opportunity to study who has the better scores, the "experts" or the audience. So James Surowiecki, author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds, actually ran the numbers. The results? While the experts got the answer right about 65 percent of the time, which is a respectable score, the audience -- made up of random dumbasses who waited in line to watch a game show -- managed to get the correct answer a shocking 91 percent of the time.

If these questions were posed over the Internet, half the audience would answer "FIRST" and the other half would call them fags.

And it doesn't just work for trivia questions, either. One researcher asked a group of 56 people how many jelly beans were in a jar. And while some people guessed way too low, and some guessed way too high, they all averaged out and guessed 871, only 21 beans higher than the actual amount.

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Well, we guess this proves that millions of people can't be wrong and Twilight is the best book of our generation.

This is why you can't dismiss "prediction markets" like Intrade, where the crowd basically bets money on outcomes for everything from elections to geopolitical events. Huge corporations now use such prediction markets to make decisions, including Google, which details the predictions in this blog post. They know what they're doing, right?