AlphaFold wins the CASP13 protein-structure contest

DeepMind’s AlphaFold placed first among entrants at the thirteenth Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction in December 2018, a blind test of methods for predicting how a protein folds. It did best on the hardest category, targets with no similar known structure.

Why it mattered Deep learning outperformed decades of physics-based methods on a standing problem in biology, two years before the larger result of AlphaFold 2.