5 ms·
Title as submitted is hyperbole, please fix?
by iandanforth 6y ago
Title as submitted is hyperbole, please fix?
- breck 6y agoI don't think it is. Look at the graph.
- sanxiyn 6y agoIt is not a hyperbole.
- EgoIncarnate 6y agoI agree. "AlphaFold achieves a median score of 87.0 GDT". While this is a major advance, to me 100 GDT would be 'solved', not 87.
- ashtonbaker 6y ago> To me Are you a domain expert? Because: > According to Professor Moult, a score of around 90 GDT is informally considered to be competitive with results obtained from experimental methods.
- The_rationalist 6y agobut experimental methods have not solved protein folding either. AlphaFold has'nt solved protein folding but I can't wait to see their progress for ALphaFold 3. What would be informatively useful would be to know how much accuracy is needed on average for drug engineers, I'd say that 99% is more likely to be the minimum to make solid inferences
- ashtonbaker 6y ago> but experimental methods have not solved protein folding either. I might be missing something here, but isn't "experimental methods" just shorthand for "our best knowledge of a protein's structure, obtained via NMR or X-ray crystallography"? In that case, I'm not sure what "solving" protein folding even means - literally zero mean error? We can't know/solve anything beyond our best knowledge, that's tautological. > What would be informatively useful would be to know how much accuracy is needed on average for drug engineers. Yeah that would be interesting, but: > I'd say that 99% is more likely to be the minimum to make solid inferences ...what are you basing this on?
- The_rationalist 6y agoIt's pretty clear what solving means, it means to have an exact representation of the 3D structure. Our partial knowledge obtained from such techniques is what it is, partial. We need new metrology that increase the observability accuracy and completeness OR better deterministic models from sequences. "We can't know/solve anything beyond our best knowledge, that's tautological." yes it is indeed tautological if you assume that experimental methods can't get better then guess what? It follows that they can't get better! "what are you basing this on?" on nothing solid, that's why I say it would be interesting. 99% is a non negligible error rate given that proteins have generally a not very high atom count and they the protein will be produced an enormous amount of time, then the 1% error progagate and can a priori easily break the system. But this guess is not solid as I'm not an expert. 99% accuracy for simple (low atom count) proteins is a sensitive error and could be negligible for very high atom count proteins.
- ashtonbaker 6y ago> It's pretty clear what solving means, it means to have an exact representation of the 3D structure. That's not clear at all, because perfect measurement doesn't exist. I agree that improving is always a worthy goal, but clearly we don't need 100% accuracy to consider something "solved" for the purposes of science. Also, "3D structure" of a protein is not a fixed truth, the parts are in motion all the time and may even have multiple semi-stable conformations. Rather than focusing on X,Y,Z perfection, I would imagine getting the angles between bonds, or the general topological conformation right would be more valuable. > if you assume that experimental methods can't get better ... I'm saying that if your definition for "solved" is "perfect knowledge", then we might as well not discuss whether method X or Y solves the problem, because they obviously do not. The more I think about it, the more I think we should just drop the whole debate over the word "solved". Clearly different experiments and different proteins will have different requirements which may or may not be met by this or by other techniques - I agree that I would be interested to hear an expert weigh in on those requirements.
- jhrmnn 6y agoBy this metric, nothing has been ever solved in natural sciences. So this is not a useful metric.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoHas it not? Neuton's laws of motion and Ohm's law are pretty om point
- joshuamorton 6y agoNot when you introduce quantum effects.
- caymanjim 6y agoNewton's laws of motion were not a complete solution, as they didn't account for relativity.
- piva00 6y agoIf you can explain how gravity works in a quantum level you'd deserve a Nobel. It's not 100% solved, Newton's Laws of Motion are a model, not a solution. Just like the vast majority of science.
- jhrmnn 6y agoNo, they are very crude (but useful!) models of reality. General relativity and quantum electrodynamics are much better corresponding models, respectively, and even those are just approximations.
- jjoonathan 6y agoIt's not.
- kgwgk 6y agoI agree. If a newspaper published a headline "Dr. Whatever cured cancer (... in some of her patients)" we would find it misleading.
- deeviant 6y agoIf there was a headline, "Company X with Product Y cured cancer" and it turns out that product Y actually only cured 90% of cancer, I'm pretty sure most people would be happy the headline. Oh, and to be a true parallel example, in this case the remaining 10% of cancers might not even be cancers, as experimental accuracy of protein structures is only ~90% accurate, the model could very well be more accurate than our current ability to experimentally detect protein structure.
- kgwgk 6y agoI really interpreted that headline as "found a general solution to the protein-folding question" not as the also interesting but not that much "can be used to solve protein-folding problems".
- dang 6y agoWe changed the title to that of the article as the site guidelines ask. Submitted title was "DeepMind Solved Protein Folding".