Apologies; looking back at my post, I wasn’t clear on 3.
Protein folding, as I understand it, is the process of finding a way to fold a given protein that globally minimizes some mathematical function. I’m not sure what that function is, but this is the definition that I used in my post.
Option 2 raises the possibility that globally minimizing that function is not NP-hard, but is merely misunderstood in some way.
Option 3 raises the possibility that proteins are not (in nature) finding a global minimum; rather, they are finding a local minimum through a less computationally intensive process. Furthermore, it may be that, for proteins which have certain limits on their structure and/or their initial conditions, that local minimum is the same as the global minimum; this may lead to natural selection favouring structures which use such ‘easy proteins’, leading to the incorrect impression that a general global minimum is being found (as opposed to a handy local minimum).
this may lead to natural selection favouring structures which use such ‘easy proteins’, leading to the incorrect impression that a general global minimum is being found (as opposed to a handy local minimum).
Apologies; looking back at my post, I wasn’t clear on 3.
Protein folding, as I understand it, is the process of finding a way to fold a given protein that globally minimizes some mathematical function. I’m not sure what that function is, but this is the definition that I used in my post.
Option 2 raises the possibility that globally minimizing that function is not NP-hard, but is merely misunderstood in some way.
Option 3 raises the possibility that proteins are not (in nature) finding a global minimum; rather, they are finding a local minimum through a less computationally intensive process. Furthermore, it may be that, for proteins which have certain limits on their structure and/or their initial conditions, that local minimum is the same as the global minimum; this may lead to natural selection favouring structures which use such ‘easy proteins’, leading to the incorrect impression that a general global minimum is being found (as opposed to a handy local minimum).
Yup.