Sean Eddy learned to write computer programs by playing Empire, a game he describes as a "fanatically detailed, multiplayer world simulation." As leaders of a country called Mirkwood, Eddy and his buddy Tom Jones dominated the Empire world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning battle after battle, including the first world tournament and the longest-running game in Empire history, which lasted nearly eight months.
Although play would occasionally take place at the expense of eating, sleeping, and doing his thesis research, Eddy says that Empire taught him the programming basics he would later parlay into software packages for identifying protein superfamilies and searching genomes for noncoding RNAs. "I wrote software to automate most of our economic and military operations in the game," says Eddy. He later recycled those same algorithms in his sequence alignment and RNA folding programs.
"Sean was big into gaming, which is the best training ...
