The new game may be more user-friendly in some ways. “I do think EteRNA will be easier to play,” said Jeehyung Lee, a computer science graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, who led the programming effort to design the game.

But mastering the molecule construction kit requires players working individually and in groups to become adept in some aspects of biochemistry. “We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” said Dr. Treuille. “RNA are these beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side there is a RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”

The scientists hope to tap the Internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus.” It was recently estimated by the software developer Rovio, for example, that its iPhone game Angry Birds consumes roughly 200 million minutes of human attention each day.

“This is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” said Dr. Treuille. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”

Whether what the researchers describe as “social computation” will have a significant impact on scientific research has yet to be seen. Foldit, in which players competed to predict protein folding, attracted more than 50,000 participants. Significantly, not only were the humans able to outperform software protein algorithms, but the scientists determined that the human strategies developed in the course of the game were significantly more flexible and adaptable than the computer-only software programs they competed against.

Another effort, Galaxy Zoo, developed to help classify deep sky objects by a broad community of astronomers, has so far enlisted more than 250,000 people in an Internet system that employs the pattern recognition skills of Web surfers. The designers initially thought that it would take a year to classify the one million galaxy images collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But within a day of the project’s start, eager users were classifying more than 70,000 objects an hour, and 50 million classifications were entered in the first year from almost 150,000 people.