Sure, but you can search for local optima, and then there’s all the environment specific factors, solvation, finite temperature, that sort of thing. Really you

Sure, but you can search for local optima, and then there’s all the environment specific factors, solvation, finite temperature, that sort of thing. Really you want the local energy landscape so you can understand dynamics and stability. (It’s not really my field) My main point is, AlphaFold isn’t displacing any general theory that predicts structure from sequence. It’s displacing other machine learning systems, which are mostly displacing just getting/making the protein and doing the X-ray crystallography (where you really do have a straightforward geometry optimization problem) Again not my field so maybe I think about it a bit weird