A billion summations and multiplications. You can fight me over this.
Wait I thought protein folding was “solved”? Is it just significantly improved or was I lied to?
Not solved, no. Definitely much much better than before. The difference AlphaFold made is significant: we’re talking about getting a decent model in a couple minutes using a PC compared to several months of calculations before.
However we still need experimental data: in many occasions AlphaFold gives an incorrect model. With some experimental data that model can be improved, but we still have no reliable way to know what the structure of a protein is starting from the amino acidic sequence without extensive experimentation.
That’s the big promise of quantum computers, there are however two major problems in my opinion:
- There’s still no theoretical framework which explains how once we have a quantum computer we may tackle protein folding
- Plenty quantum computing companies closed shortly after AlphaFold was published since they lost all funding because protein folding was “solved”
Gotcha, thank you ❤️
My mind thought about this ancient meme about katanas and how they’re folded 1000 times
Maybe samurai just needed bigger pockets




