[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 09:15:27AM +0100, Max M wrote:
> 
> I think that point that John tried to make is that it is deterministic, 

Of course it's determistic! We're alive, aren't we?

> not chaotic. And so should allow simplification. We just need some way 

It is not obvious that you can compute the folding target without expediting
much less computational work than the folding molecule itself does. Given
brute-force via MD with ~fs integration step target it is obvious that we need
lots faster computers than today (which typically do 1 fs within 1 s wall
clock time; fast folders can fold in ms, we can presume we can bootstrap nano
with fast folders alone -- you'll need min/h scale to understand biology,
though) to do it brute force.

The state of the art is here: <http://predictioncenter.llnl.gov/>

It is pretty pathetic but for a few special cases.

> to add the hinges.
> 
> Emzyme chemistry and proteomics will be soo big. I am pretty shure that 
> Nano will come from this direction.

Bottom-up (self-assembly) is going to result in practical molecular
electronics before top-down (machine-phase nanorobotics). We should be able
to use the computational resources of molecular electronics to design the
latter, though.
 
> So fast protein folding will be a really big issue.

You need a machine to fold in minutes to hours of wall clock time for in
machina design (reverse folding problem by evolutionary algorithms on primary
sequence).
 
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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