I came across an interesting article about a novel use of games and and collaborative efforts.
"Foldit is a multiplayer online game in which players collaborate and compete to create accurate protein structure models. For specific hard problems, Foldit player solutions can in some cases outperform state-of-the-art computational methods."
Click on the link following for the full article.
Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players (http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18949.full)
This reminds me a bit about AntMe- there was a similar trend for people sharing coding patterns and collaborating to create new strategies, and some of them were considered pretty amazing. I think it makes sense: Get a lot of people together to think about something, and there will eventually some sort of breakthrough. Brain beats computer quite often!