Agreed, tho to clarify, gonna need more than a billion. Like Alpha Fold is the closest I’ve read about… Dunno how many summations and multiplications it is, but I know it’s more than a billion
But I’m convinced configuring a quantum computer with enough qbits to solve it is just going to be so much more difficult than throwing few quintillion more billion summations and multiplications.
I mean… modern CPUs can do multiple billions of summations and multiplications in a single second (let alone GPUs), and yet protein folding can take a long time.
A quantum computer is MUCH faster for finding viable solutions, though they’re MUCH harder to set up even for individual problems, and still need verification of the results.
I did not yet see a single quantum algorithm able to tackle the protein folding problem.
Sure, quantum computers could be faster at solving graph related problems, but I did not see an approach able to reduce protein folding to a graph problem.
On the other hand neural networks have been successfully applied to the protein folding problem, and they do that quite quickly.
Not a perfect solution indeed, quantum computers may be much better at that; but I still do not see a theoretical framework which justifies claims as to the applicability of quantum computers to the protein folding problem.
Because checking a billion proteins for the shape we want is a hardware problem, and the hardware for doing that is very slow and expensive. If we can fold proteins using software, we can try billions of proteins far faster and cheaper. We could probably work backwards too, reducing the search space from billions to millions.
A billion summations and multiplications. You can fight me over this.
Agreed, tho to clarify, gonna need more than a billion. Like Alpha Fold is the closest I’ve read about… Dunno how many summations and multiplications it is, but I know it’s more than a billion
But I’m convinced configuring a quantum computer with enough qbits to solve it is just going to be so much more difficult than throwing few quintillion more billion summations and multiplications.
I mean… modern CPUs can do multiple billions of summations and multiplications in a single second (let alone GPUs), and yet protein folding can take a long time.
A quantum computer is MUCH faster for finding viable solutions, though they’re MUCH harder to set up even for individual problems, and still need verification of the results.
I did not yet see a single quantum algorithm able to tackle the protein folding problem.
Sure, quantum computers could be faster at solving graph related problems, but I did not see an approach able to reduce protein folding to a graph problem.
On the other hand neural networks have been successfully applied to the protein folding problem, and they do that quite quickly.
Not a perfect solution indeed, quantum computers may be much better at that; but I still do not see a theoretical framework which justifies claims as to the applicability of quantum computers to the protein folding problem.
Why are we protein folding? The largest quantum computer — the Universe — already solved it because we’re standing.
Because checking a billion proteins for the shape we want is a hardware problem, and the hardware for doing that is very slow and expensive. If we can fold proteins using software, we can try billions of proteins far faster and cheaper. We could probably work backwards too, reducing the search space from billions to millions.
But like… the helium gets all wavy man…