Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Research, Science Fiction
“Deep Thought” was the name of the computer in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” where it took millions of years to find the answer to “life, the universe, and everything” is 42.
An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence.
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.
“This is a big deal,” says John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who co-founded CASP in 1994 to improve computational methods for accurately predicting protein structures. “In some sense the problem is solved.”
‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures, Ewen Callaway, Nature
Physics and Nano 