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DeepMind’s AI is claimed to make gigantic leap in solving protein structures:

Accepted submission by Hartree at 2020-11-30 18:30:58 from the Solved for suitably small value of "solved" dept.
Science

DeepMind’s program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference — held virtually this year — that takes stock of the exercise.

John Moult of the University of Maryland in College Park (founder of this conference) says: “In some sense the problem is solved.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4 [nature.com]

Many Caveats: This seems unusually breathless for Nature and this is a very hard problem that's been worked on for decades. Having worked in a group studying the protein folding problem back in the 80s, I've learned to be pretty skeptical of miracles in this over the years. That said if it is accurate that this works well enough to provide clues to x-ray diffraction determination of structure in hard cases, that alone makes it very worthwhile. If it works well in truly de novo cases without other information like x-ray diffraction or nuclear magnetic resonance then it would be just as revolutionary as the article says.


Original Submission