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AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

deepmind.com

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Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#531

Post by refulgentis »

woeirua wrote: post #106
aardvarkr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every simulator is going to have error. In this case this biennial challenge represents the computational state of the art with scores of 30-40 over the last decade. The AlphaFold2 model sends that score up to 87 with errors about than the width of the atom. You can actually see the difference between their prediction and the actual result and it’s stunning. This is all on the blog site so I recommend reading before…

I read the blog. But there’s a big difference between a mind blowing tech demo and something that can be used in a commercially viable process.

There's a difference between being a random commentator on HN and being one of the several experts in the field quoted in the article, among other things, predicting a mass exodus from the computational biology field as the major problem of that field is now solved.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#532

Post by mnky9800n »

Tomminn wrote: post #524
softwaredoug wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think we would do ourselves a service by not recognizing that what just happened presents a serious indictment of academic science. Much like other fields, I do begin to question the academic structure to making advances. It appears something is rotten in the state of academia. Oddly it's academia doing incremental improvements to existing methods but industry making novel leaps and bounds... The other majo…

Almost every single of the tens of thousand papers by the hundreds of tenured academics in the field of protein folding are made obsolete by 10 google engineers. This is what it's like when someone really moves the needle. And academic science cannot get it's head around it. And yet, none of these scientists will suffer any career consequences. Their irrelevant work will be healthily cited by all the other scientists…

Did you miss the part where a bunch of the deepmind authors did phds and postdocs in protein folding related fields?

They pushed the needle because they understood the field and the new tools. This is how pushing the needle works.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#533

Post by e_y_ »

bosswipe wrote: post #499
elcritch wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also makes one reconsider the notion that monopolies are entirely bad. This essentially appears to be a vanity project for Google. Though of course they'll benefit from it in many ways, but it's not like they're doing this as the core product of their service. It's a pretty awesome achievement.

Imagine we lived in a culture that did not believe "government is always bad at everything". Government could then pay Google-level salaries and provide Google-level resources to the top minds in the world and give them free rein to tackle problems like this. It's worked in the past, such as Manhattan project or moon landing. But I don't think it's doable nowadays because of the anti-government political culture. Eve…

It'll take more than just belief in the government. We'd need people to actually care about making government better.

Most people just show up to vote once every 4 years (or less) and make their decision based on the party affiliation or the wedge issue du jour, and the rest of the time pretty much ignore what's going on or don't have the power to do anything about it, which gives a lot of leeway for special interests to slide things in under the radar.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#535

Post by drusepth »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #523
rsiqueira wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God." (Way Of The Future - AI Church)

That would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.

Well, this relies on the assumption that a God also inherently exists outside of time and space, which is debatable even among religious scholars.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#536

Post by daxfohl »

Is this going to put biologists that study this problem (and there are a lot of them, right?) out of business?

This is the tipping point where I think the AI singularity may have teeth. I could see math proofs being the next thing to fall. If AI solves the remaining six millennium problems in the next few years, what does that mean for math researchers?

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#538

Post by endtime »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #523
rsiqueira wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God." (Way Of The Future - AI Church)

That would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.

Actually, it would just require that you can't tell whether or not it does.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#539

Post by gamegoblin »

CJefferson wrote: post #23

Has anyone got any good other references for this? After some of the dodgy experiments related to alpha zero (comparing to purposefully degraded chess systems), I'd love to see some independent analysis.

The "dodgy experiments" (setting the per-turn computation time to a fixed value) in the chess system were only in the pre-print. In the actual publication, they allowed for full time control of the most up-to-date version of stockfish.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#540

Post by sudosysgen »

drusepth wrote: post #535
mensetmanusman wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.

Well, this relies on the assumption that a God also inherently exists outside of time and space, which is debatable even among religious scholars.

I just had a discussion with a friend about this! It's indeed a very difficult question. We ended on the conclusion that God can't possibly exist outside of time and space in the Abrahamic tradition because he precedes the creation of the Universe, but I'm sure there's a twist we missed somewhere.
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