![]() Proteins are large biomolecules constructed from amino acid residues and are fundamental to all animal life. And the company that created it? You guessed it – DeepMind. The computer is a machine called AlphaFold. The question is how to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. The article was about the contemporary search for the secret to life and the role of a supercomputer in helping to answer it. It’s years since I read Adams’s wonderful novel, but an article published in Nature last month brought it vividly to mind. Machine-learning may soon enable us to accurately predict how a protein will fold. And the name of the supercomputer? Why, Deep Thought, of course. The computer helpfully points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. ![]() The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42. F ans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything.
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