alt Hacker News>DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes.
This is not even close to reality. AlphaFold is not a solution to the protein folding problem, it's (useful) pattern matching to the end state of solved folded protein (in situations that can be pattern matched). If this is considered "solving the protein folding problem" then X-ray crystallography solved it first, 75 years ago.
There is essentially zero "how" information coming to us from AlphaFold. This type of reporting is incorrect, and irresponsible to the folks that are still working on that how problem.
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The kind of solution you want may not be possible.
There is no guarantee that a tractable method exists to analytically invert protein folding. Data-driven methods like alphafold may be the only option.
Yes and correct me if I'm wrong, but they never did deeper work on dynamics. I think that's very telling.
It's an NP hard problem.
To SOLVE it would easily win the Nobel, possibly the Turing and more.
Designer proteins would change the world and medicine also in unimaginable ways.
they're probably referring to CASP13/14
Pissed me off since day one that got by with that "solving" shit. Not to downplay what they did, but it had little to do with the problem as it's been understood to mean.
And to be clear I do think it was nobel worthy.