[Andy_G11]

I wonder if we could get AI to code biological outcomes using biomolecular objects (as in object oriented programming), and what level of computing technology / how comprehensive a database of biochemical reactions would be needed to do this. Could this be something that is achievable in 20 yrs, perhaps speeded up with the aid of quantum computing?

[junon]

Disclaimer, not a biologist. Ex did a lot of work in this area though.

If I understand your query (it's hard to parse), then no, AI is nothing that would help. This is an insanely hard problem to understand let alone solve. You're asking for a cartesian of every possible interaction of every possible enzyme, protein, molecule, etc. which, if it were possible to do with existing tech, it would have been done already.

ML (AI) is, at least right now, fancy pattern matching. Nothing more.

Further, Quantum computers can only run certain classes of programs, at least for now. Also not an expert there but if these two fields have been married in any way it's certainly not been done with any amount of clarity.

Hopefully that's a somewhat sufficient, serious answer. The question itself is very.... uh, r/futurism, if we're being honest. You can't just throw AI and Quantum at hard problems expecting them to just somehow solve them.

[jjcon]

> ML (AI) is, at least right now, fancy pattern matching. Nothing more.

I mean, every problem can be boiled down to some sort of 'fancy pattern matching', the question is really how fancy/sophisticated the solver and how large the problem space the problem. I'm not sure why AI couldn't be helpful here even if the convergence of the solver/problem space are still many years off.

[Andy_G11]

Thanks for your response. I did chemistry and physics and uni (almost 30 years ago now) and I remember how complex some of the computer modelling that was done at the time was (even for very simple things - I think we looked at a model of what happened when a proton and a hydrogen atom came into close proximity).

Since then things have advanced hugely - both in biochem and in computing - and I was curious to see what might have been done. Also, hard science is fundamentally pattern recognition, isn't it: it requires that given the same inputs, the same output is consistently delivered.

[narrator]

Biology is not a serial process though. Everything is interacting with everything all at once. Some of those processes take exponential time complexity to simulate in computers, though deep learning is getting us better approximations of those processes in a shorter amount of time. The point being, biological systems don't have the certainty and exactness to program them like a computer. Everything does works out roughly at the macro scale.

[dgowte]

What is this nonsensical buzzword soup?

[jjcon]

Buzzword soup aside I think we all understand what they are asking and it is an interesting question. Will we be able to model (through any computation via any computing means) biological processes at a deeper level to accurately determine outcomes someday in the future?

[Andy_G11]

What don't you understand?

[herval]

The only word you forgot in that buzzword bingo was blockchain :-)