beta_helix Staff Lv 1
You probably know that David Baker was one of the co-founders of Foldit, but did you know how Foldit inspired this year's other 2 Nobel Prize winners (Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, creators of AlphaFold)?
www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1045016/ai-deepmind-demis-hassabis-alphafold
Watching AlphaGo play in Seoul, Hassabis says, he’d been reminded of an online game called FoldIt, which a team led by David Baker, a leading protein researcher at the University of Washington, released in 2008… Hassabis played that game when he was a postdoc at MIT in his 20s. He was struck by the way basic human intuition could lead to real breakthroughs, whether making a move in Go or finding a new configuration in FoldIt. “I was thinking about what we had actually done with AlphaGo,” says Hassabis. “We’d mimicked the intuition of incredible Go masters. I thought, if we can mimic the pinnacle of intuition in Go, then why couldn’t we map that across to proteins?”
So congrats to all 3 deserving winners, and to all of you for inspiring this Nobel Prize-worthy work!
