3 ms·
It depends on what you mean by "the field". Do you mean machine learning? That might be the case given the corporate dominance of that technique. But in bioinfo
by jhbadger 6y ago
It depends on what you mean by "the field". Do you mean machine learning? That might be the case given the corporate dominance of that technique. But in bioinformatics (the domain to which AlphaFold2 is applying ML to) it is generally expected that all data and code be made available for a tool. Otherwise what's the point? If people can't build upon it, science hasn't been done.
- timr 6y agoYou're overstating the situation. The previous top-performing protein folding method is essentially impossible to reproduce from public literature, and available only via licensing agreement with the lab that created it. More generally, while it's far more common to find open-source implementations of lab research than it used to be, it's still quite common for code to be closed, and important methodological details to be secret. Even in the "open" fields of ML, today, I routinely find papers where essential bits of code, parameter sets, etc. are not made available.