[Levinthal's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) was the thought experiment that "pro

[Levinthal's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) was the thought experiment that "proved" that protein folding is non-random. This is currently the dominant attitude in the field. As others have stated, misfoldings do occur, and the protein is trying to achieve its lowest energy conformation, but the simplest answer is that we don't have a complete answer, hence the desire to come up with a reliable computational solution. We know how certain residues affect tertiary structure, and we know the measurements of secondary structures with a surprising degree of accuracy, but for a protein with potentially hundreds of residues, there are simply too many degrees of freedom to simply tack on amino acids and come up with a structure (although this is essentially the approach that markov chain, monte carlo solutions use). [This article gives a pretty good synopsis of where computational approaches to the protein folding problem stand.](https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/ https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...)