I’m on record as early as 2008 as saying that I expected superintelligences to crack protein folding, some people disputed that and were all like “But how do you know that’s solvable?” and then AlphaFold 2 came along and cracked the protein folding problem they’d been skeptical about, far below the level of superintelligence.
This is tangential nitpicking (I agree that protein folding is solvable), but I don’t think AlphaFold 2 entirely cracked it. AFAIU, AF2 relies on multiple sequence alignment as part of its input: the sequences of homologous proteins from different species. This is a standard method to simplify the problem, because by observing that certain parts of the sequence tend to vary together between homologues, you can guess that they correspond to chain fragments that are adjacent in the folded configuration.
Ofc even so it is very impressive and has plenty of applications. But, if you want to invent your own proteins from scratch, this is not good enough.
Well, if viewing it on that level, AlphaFold 2 didn’t crack the full problem because it doesn’t let you put in a chemical function and get out a protein which performs that function while subject to other constraints of a surrounding wet system, which is the protein folding problem you have to solve to get wet nanotech out the other end, which is why we don’t already have general wet nanotech today.
This is tangential nitpicking (I agree that protein folding is solvable), but I don’t think AlphaFold 2 entirely cracked it. AFAIU, AF2 relies on multiple sequence alignment as part of its input: the sequences of homologous proteins from different species. This is a standard method to simplify the problem, because by observing that certain parts of the sequence tend to vary together between homologues, you can guess that they correspond to chain fragments that are adjacent in the folded configuration.
Ofc even so it is very impressive and has plenty of applications. But, if you want to invent your own proteins from scratch, this is not good enough.
Well, if viewing it on that level, AlphaFold 2 didn’t crack the full problem because it doesn’t let you put in a chemical function and get out a protein which performs that function while subject to other constraints of a surrounding wet system, which is the protein folding problem you have to solve to get wet nanotech out the other end, which is why we don’t already have general wet nanotech today.