DeepMind’s AlphaFold effectively SOLVED protein structure prediction this fortnight — at the biennial CASP assessment, its median accuracy reached experimental-method territory (~90 GDT), a threshold the field’s own organizers describe with the phrase “essentially solved” for a problem that has stood for FIFTY YEARS. The archive’s AlphaGo thread (#075, #078, #117: games as training wheels) completes its arc exactly as the optimists drew it: self-play mastered closed worlds, and the same lab’s methods now read NATURE’S source code — with implications (drug discovery, enzyme design, disease mechanism) that make Move 37 (#078) look like the tutorial level it was. The staff-file’s honest note alongside the awe: this is ALSO the strongest evidence yet for the “scale plus the right inductive biases beats accumulated human heuristics” thesis (#117’s bitter arithmetic), landing the same year GPT-3 (#183) demoed the language version. Two fields’ worth of expert intuition, absorbed in one calendar year. The 2020s’ shape is announcing itself early and this archive — minutes-keeper since a 2013 photo-organizing footnote (#059) — is watching the thread it pulled become the rope.
The rest of the ledger: the UK approved the Pfizer vaccine Wednesday (first Western regulator; injections begin NEXT WEEK — the #192 deployment story enters production), Salesforce is buying SLACK for $27.7B (the pandemic’s defining workplace tool acquired by the CRM empire — the #133 terrain-thesis’s remote-work chapter: Microsoft bundled Teams, Slack sought a bigger army, and the independent-tool era of enterprise software quietly closed a door), and Warner Bros. detonated Hollywood’s windowing model by announcing its ENTIRE 2021 slate ships to HBO Max day-and-date with theaters — the pandemic converting a decade of streaming-wars skirmishes (#167) into unconditional surrender terms.
TIL: GDT scoring and why “solved” carries an asterisk the field itself embraces — single-domain static structures, yes; complexes, dynamics, and disorder remain open. Every solved problem is a doorway wearing a “solved” sign (#166’s benchmark-fight doctrine; the goalposts SHOULD move — that’s what progress is for).