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[–] [S] 36 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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:

  1. There's still no theoretical framework which explains how once we have a quantum computer we may tackle protein folding
  2. Plenty quantum computing companies closed shortly after AlphaFold was published since they lost all funding because protein folding was "solved"
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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    90% of quantum computing is a hype scam anyway.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 3 months ago

    Agreed, I still do hope they can maintain some of their promises. However until now, I have not really seen any real advances towards making something useful.

    I do not have a deep knowledge of quantum computers, but I know plenty people working on them and often get to talk about it.

    I know people working on chemical problems who are basically approximating atoms to point charges. And either way those calculations are slower than on a CPU. For the uninformed, in chemistry the interactions between electronic orbitals is fundamental; this is in no way an approximation useful to obtain any kind of information.

    This is fine, I understand methodologies take time to develop; however as far as I understand it those techniques they're using are mathematically limited to using point charges: no matter how much they improve them that'll be the highest level of accuracy.

    I hope someone finds a way to handle such things better: as much as you can make a great machine learning model you're always depending on available data.

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