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Awesome. I wrote a thesis on protein structure prediction in 1995. We weren't very good at it then. Amazing to see this.
by Quarrel 5y ago
Awesome.
I wrote a thesis on protein structure prediction in 1995. We weren't very good at it then. Amazing to see this.
- VSerge 5y agoI remember that the scientific game "Fold It" was also quite exciting when it came out 12-13 years ago or so, since populations of players could get results beyond what either specialists or computer systems could achieve. I guess one could argue that an AI such as this could be compared to a large automated population of trained players trying to solve a 3D puzzle.
- kevstev 5y agoI did some undergraduate research on this around 1999. At the time we were trying to prove that we could throw more firepower at the problem by building a beowulf cluster to solve the problem. After a bit of tweaking, we were able to get more performance than a single machine, but soon seti@home was released and to me at least the writing was on the wall that we were not taking the most optimal approach. In hindsight though, we were so far off from both an algorithmic perspective and a hardware perspective to actually achieving meaningful results. I am glad, 20 years later it seems real progress is being made. I haven't really followed the folding@home project in many many years, but its not clear to me much came out of it that was all that useful, at least not in practical terms.
- ac29 5y agoNot sure about folding@home, but the lab that runs rosetta@home released a paper earlier this month claiming they have a new algorithm with comparable results to AlphaFold2: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/07/19/science.abj8754 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/07/19/scie... I don't believe this new approach runs on their distributed compute network, but its cool to see some good competition.