Jan 04, 2016 02:01 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A pair of researchers devised a method that combines human cognition with computer intelligence that would help solve the world's biggest problems.

According to Live Science, the idea is to maximize what humans do best and apply it to computers. Published in the journal Science, the new study details a field known as human computation.

"By enabling members of the general public to play some simple online game, we expect to reduce the time to treatment discovery from decades to just a few years," study lead author Pietro Michelucci, the director of the Human Computation Institute, said in a press release. "This gives an opportunity for anyone, including the tech-savvy generation of caregivers and early stage Alzheimer's patients, to take the matter into their own hands."

For the study, Michelucci collaborated with Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology.

"By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes," Dickinson said in the release.

Whereas humans excel at creative thinking, computers can store and process massive amounts of data. The researchers theorized neither is capable of solving large-scale "wicked" problems like climate change and global conflict on their own, but are much better suited for the task when collaborating.

"The key to addressing wicked problems is to create a working model, [a] computer simulation, of all of the interacting systems that pertain to a given problem," Michelucci told Live Science. "Imagine something like the game SimCity, but a thousand times more detailed. Then link in real-time sensors attached to the Internet. The more faithful the model is to the real world, the more accurate it will be for testing out solutions and predicting outcomes."

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