I think there’s a real sense in which the band gap problem is genuinely more quantum-mechanical in nature than the protein folding problem. It’s very common that people will model proteins with a classical approximation, where you assume that eg. each bond has a specific level of stiffness, etc. (Often these values themselves are calculated using density functional theory.) But even given this classical approximation, many proteins take so long to settle into a folded configuration that simulating them is very expensive.
Also, last time I looked in any detail, the current version of Alpha Fold did use multiple sequence alignment, which means that some of its utility comes from the fact that it’s predicting evolved sequences, and so generalization to synthetic sequences might be iffy.
In the same sense you could say this is exactly the same. For any classical computer:
-protein folding is intractable in general, then whatever natural selection found must constitute special cases that are tractable, and that’s most probably what alphafold found. This was extraordinary cool, but that doesn’t mean alphafold solved protein folding in general. Even nature can get prions wrong.
-quantum computing is intractable in general, but one can find special cases that are actually tractable, or where good approximations is all you need, and that what occupy most of physicists time.
In other words, you can expect a superintelligence to find marvelous pieces of science, or to kill everyone with classical guns, or to kill everyone with techs that looks like magic, but it won’t actually break RSA, for the same reason it won’t beat you at tic-tac-toe: superintelligences won’t beat math.
I think there’s a real sense in which the band gap problem is genuinely more quantum-mechanical in nature than the protein folding problem. It’s very common that people will model proteins with a classical approximation, where you assume that eg. each bond has a specific level of stiffness, etc. (Often these values themselves are calculated using density functional theory.) But even given this classical approximation, many proteins take so long to settle into a folded configuration that simulating them is very expensive.
Also, last time I looked in any detail, the current version of Alpha Fold did use multiple sequence alignment, which means that some of its utility comes from the fact that it’s predicting evolved sequences, and so generalization to synthetic sequences might be iffy.
In the same sense you could say this is exactly the same. For any classical computer:
-protein folding is intractable in general, then whatever natural selection found must constitute special cases that are tractable, and that’s most probably what alphafold found. This was extraordinary cool, but that doesn’t mean alphafold solved protein folding in general. Even nature can get prions wrong.
-quantum computing is intractable in general, but one can find special cases that are actually tractable, or where good approximations is all you need, and that what occupy most of physicists time.
In other words, you can expect a superintelligence to find marvelous pieces of science, or to kill everyone with classical guns, or to kill everyone with techs that looks like magic, but it won’t actually break RSA, for the same reason it won’t beat you at tic-tac-toe: superintelligences won’t beat math.