Foldit

Post Reply New Topic

Does anyone play the biology game foldit about folding proteins?

A new paper shows how scientists can now make proteins that bind a bunch of different targets. How did they do it — and what does this breakthrough mean for Foldit?

fold.it

Hasn't Alphafold 2 made that obsolete by now?

this alphafold business is unbelievable.

heard about this before but forgot.

I guess it depends on how accurate the simulations are, and I'm not sure if it can do any protein...

It's amazing how much we have still to learn despite these amazing advances.

I've played it before. And I actually intend to someday try to write my own structure prediction software. Though at first at least it would almost have to be as a hobby. Alphafold is amazing, but it doesn't give much if any insight into how folding actually works since it's such a black box. That's the fundamental problem I have with pretty much any machine learning algorithm. Whether or not it can be improved upon, it seems that it would be difficult to even get a grant to work on this problem in a manner that uses a substantially different approach from Alphafold.

Idea is that humans are better at this than even the best AI.
That is why they are crowdsourcing it.
So don't bother trying go code it.
Unless - you think coding is fun - then go ahead.