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JoeMerchant [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google’s Deepmind [nature.com] claims [independent.co.uk] to have created an artificially intelligent program called “AlphaFold” that is able to solve protein folding problems in a matter of days.

If it works, the solution has come “decades” before it was expected, according to experts, and could have transformative effects in the way diseases are treated.

There are 200 million known proteins at present but only a fraction have actually been unfolded to fully understand what they do and how they work. Even those that have been successfully understood often rely on expensive and time-intensive techniques, with scientists spending years unfolding each structure and relying on equipment that can cost many millions of dollars.

DeepMind worked on the AI project with the 14th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14), a group of scientists who have been looking into the matter since 1994.

Go, Chess, COVID...

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