Wild. I was first introduced to heuristic search in drug discovery at a biotech company in 1993. Support vector networks were searching for good shapes by 1997

Wild. I was first introduced to heuristic search in drug discovery at a biotech company in 1993. Support vector networks were searching for good shapes by 1997, maybe before then, but the vocabulary we used to describe the search technique was different. A huge computational hurdle was protein folding. We had brute-force searches for plausible shapes, lots of supervision by the chemists, weeks per iteration on the best workstations we could get. $250,000+ SGI Onyx, then DEC sent over an Alpha workstation. It's come a long ways.