Douglas Adams Was Right – Knowledge Without Understanding is Meaningless
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Douglas Adams was right - knowledge without understanding is meaningless
Fans 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. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42. The computer helpfully points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. And the name of the supercomputer? Why, Deep Thought, of course.
It's years since I read Adams's wonderful novel, but an article published in Nature last month brought it vividly to mind. The article was about the contemporary search for the secret to life and the role of a supercomputer in helping to answer it. The question is how to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. The computer is a machine called AlphaFold. And the company that created it? You guessed it - DeepMind.
Proteins are large biomolecules constructed from amino acid residues and are fundamental to all animal life. They are, says one expert, "the most spectacular machines ever created for moving atoms at the nanoscale and often do chemistry orders of magnitude more efficiently than anything that we've built".
But these vital biomachines are also inscrutable because they assemble themselves into structures of astonishing complexity and beauty. (Illustrations of them make one think of what can go wrong when trying to wrap Christmas presents with those nice ribbons that only shop assistants can manage.) Understanding this "folding" process is one of the key challenges in biochemistry, partly because proteins are necessary for virtually every cell in a body and partly because it's suspected that mis-folding may help to explain diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
[...] Two years ago, DeepMind, having conquered the board game Go, decided to take on the challenge, using the deep-learning technology it had developed for Go. The resulting machine was, predictably, named AlphaFold. At the CASP meeting last December, it unveiled the results. Its machine was, on average, more accurate than the other teams and by some criteria it was significantly ahead of the others. For protein sequences modelled from scratch - 43 of the 90 - AlphaFold made the most accurate prediction for 25 proteins. Its nearest rival only managed three.
[...] It's conceivable that a machine-learning approach will soon enable us to make accurate predictions of how a protein will fold and this may be very useful to know. But it won't be scientific knowledge. After all, AlphaFold knows nothing about biochemistry. We're heading into uncharted territory.
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