It’s been tried, and our computational capabilities fell woefully short of succeeding.
Is that because we don’t have enough brute force, or because we don’t know what calculation to apply it to?
I would be unsurprised to learn that calculating the folding state having global minimum energy was NP-complete; but for that reason I would be surprised to learn that nature solves that problem, rather than finding a local minimum.
I don’t have a background in biology, but my impression from Wikipedia is that the tension between Anfinsen’s dogma and
Levinthal’s paradox is yet unresolved.
A-la Levinthal’s paradox, I can say that throwing a marble down a conical hollow at different angles and force can have literally trillions of possible trajectories; a-la Anfinsen’s dogma, that should not stop me from predicting that it will end up at the bottom of the cone; but I’d need to know the shape of the cone (or, more specifically, its point’s location) to determine exactly where that is—so being able to make the prediction once I know this is of no assistance for predicting the end position with a different, unknown cone.
Similarly, Eliezer is able to predict that a grandmaster chess player would be able to bring a board to a winning position against himself, even though he has no idea what moves that would entail or which of the many trillions of possible move sets the game would be comprised of.
Problems like this cannot be solved on brute force alone; you need to use attractors and heuristics to get where you want to get.
So yes, obviously nature stumbled into certain stable configurations which propelled it forward, rather than solve the problem and start designing away. But even if we can never have enough computing power to model each and every atom in each and every configuration, we might still get a good enough understanding of the general laws for designing proteins almost from scratch.
Is that because we don’t have enough brute force, or because we don’t know what calculation to apply it to?
I would be unsurprised to learn that calculating the folding state having global minimum energy was NP-complete; but for that reason I would be surprised to learn that nature solves that problem, rather than finding a local minimum.
I don’t have a background in biology, but my impression from Wikipedia is that the tension between Anfinsen’s dogma and Levinthal’s paradox is yet unresolved.
The two are not in conflict.
A-la Levinthal’s paradox, I can say that throwing a marble down a conical hollow at different angles and force can have literally trillions of possible trajectories; a-la Anfinsen’s dogma, that should not stop me from predicting that it will end up at the bottom of the cone; but I’d need to know the shape of the cone (or, more specifically, its point’s location) to determine exactly where that is—so being able to make the prediction once I know this is of no assistance for predicting the end position with a different, unknown cone.
Similarly, Eliezer is able to predict that a grandmaster chess player would be able to bring a board to a winning position against himself, even though he has no idea what moves that would entail or which of the many trillions of possible move sets the game would be comprised of.
Problems like this cannot be solved on brute force alone; you need to use attractors and heuristics to get where you want to get.
So yes, obviously nature stumbled into certain stable configurations which propelled it forward, rather than solve the problem and start designing away. But even if we can never have enough computing power to model each and every atom in each and every configuration, we might still get a good enough understanding of the general laws for designing proteins almost from scratch.