Why isn't it possible to solve the protein folding problem with a physics simulation?<br><br>It seems to be a unique and deterministic process.,(reply>), Direct simulation takes too many arithmetic operations. There are specialized supercomputers just for such an application, and there is a crowd-sourced project where people donate time on their computers to run molecular dynamics simulations. Today this achieves the aggregate computational power of slightly over 10^18 arithmetic operations per second, but it still takes months of operation to directly simulate the dynamics of a very small protein.<br><br>So you want to somehow to do this more cleverly and avoid simulating the degrees of freedom that do not really matter in the end. That's what AI essentially does. It is a shortcut to arrive to the same result without doing as much work.