Google's DeepMind predicts 3D shapes of proteins

AI program's understanding of proteins could usher in new era of medical progress

Having laid waste to the Atari classics and reached superhuman performance in chess and the Chinese board game, Go, Google's DeepMind outfit has turned its artificial intelligence on one of the toughest problems in science.

The result, perhaps, was predictable. At an international conference in Cancun on Sunday, organisers announced that DeepMind's latest AI program, AlphaFold, had beaten all-comers at a particularly fiendish task: predicting the 3D shapes of proteins, the fundamental molecules of life.