But it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. A case in point is the way that artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised our ability to calculate the structures that proteins adopt. Deep-learning AIs don’t attempt to crack this by modelling the physics. Instead, they are trained on thousands of known protein structures and use this knowledge to predict new ones. In July 2022, AI firm DeepMind said that its AlphaFold algorithm had calculated the structures of 200 million proteins, nearly all of those known to science. Sometimes, the limits of what it is practically possible to fathom can change drastically in a blink.
New Scientist