In a prior(/n) life I worked on Protein folding, and participated in CASP.
This was a/the "holy grail" problem of molecular biology, long thought to be an automatic Nobel. It's somewhat unfair to characterise developments prior to this as insignificant. In fact by the time I was working on it, that "automatic Nobel" was no longer assumed, because the field had made quite a bit of progress, in many tiny steps by many different groups, and the assumption was it would continue in this slog until reaching some state of sufficiency for practical applications without ever seeing the sort of singular achievement that would be worthy of praise and prize.
Far more went into this breakthrough, obviously, than those TPU-hours: the development of those TPUs, for example, and assembling a team that can make use of them. The protein folding problem requires very little knowledge of biology or physics to understand and was always pre-destined for some outsider to sweep. Indeed, there was game that allowed people to solve structures by intuition alone, and, IIRC, some 13-year old Mexican kid cleaned everyone's clock some years back.
Why didn't some research group do this first? Most of them just don't have the budget. We were five people, total, IIRC, and felt pretty rich because we were computer-people getting the same budget for materials as everyone at our institution, which was all wetlab, otherwise. So I was a student being paid $20/h but with a $50,000/p.a. hardware budget. How many false start does it take before you do that run with 128TPUs "for a few weeks" that works? If you blow your budget on one gigantic Google invoice, what's going to happen to you when it doesn't pan out, and the whole institute laughs at you? Etc...
There are quite a few rather good things this problem has inspired over the years, though. Among them is CASP itself: the idea of instituting a yearly competition that gives unequivocal feedback on the state of the field and every group working on it is rather rare, I believe, and it's been successful. Indeed, it would seem that CASP was necessary to attract outside groups like Deepmind, i. e. deep-pocketed industry groups striving to prove themselves on a clearly defined problem. Chess, Jeopardy, CASP: maybe it would be worthwhile to explore not <solving x>, but <stating X as a problem that attracts Google/IBM/etc.-scale money> as a superior strategy in some cases.
There was also folding@home, pioneering the distributed-donated-computing model, and the aforementioned gamification of the problem, and hundreds of the most intricate, custom-tailed, more-or-less insane ideas people devoted months and/or careers and/or careers of their most promising post-docs to that didn't pan out.
Like cellular automata. They don't work for this, trust me. (Great hit for interactive poster sessions, though)
This was a/the "holy grail" problem of molecular biology, long thought to be an automatic Nobel. It's somewhat unfair to characterise developments prior to this as insignificant. In fact by the time I was working on it, that "automatic Nobel" was no longer assumed, because the field had made quite a bit of progress, in many tiny steps by many different groups, and the assumption was it would continue in this slog until reaching some state of sufficiency for practical applications without ever seeing the sort of singular achievement that would be worthy of praise and prize.
Far more went into this breakthrough, obviously, than those TPU-hours: the development of those TPUs, for example, and assembling a team that can make use of them. The protein folding problem requires very little knowledge of biology or physics to understand and was always pre-destined for some outsider to sweep. Indeed, there was game that allowed people to solve structures by intuition alone, and, IIRC, some 13-year old Mexican kid cleaned everyone's clock some years back.
Why didn't some research group do this first? Most of them just don't have the budget. We were five people, total, IIRC, and felt pretty rich because we were computer-people getting the same budget for materials as everyone at our institution, which was all wetlab, otherwise. So I was a student being paid $20/h but with a $50,000/p.a. hardware budget. How many false start does it take before you do that run with 128TPUs "for a few weeks" that works? If you blow your budget on one gigantic Google invoice, what's going to happen to you when it doesn't pan out, and the whole institute laughs at you? Etc...
There are quite a few rather good things this problem has inspired over the years, though. Among them is CASP itself: the idea of instituting a yearly competition that gives unequivocal feedback on the state of the field and every group working on it is rather rare, I believe, and it's been successful. Indeed, it would seem that CASP was necessary to attract outside groups like Deepmind, i. e. deep-pocketed industry groups striving to prove themselves on a clearly defined problem. Chess, Jeopardy, CASP: maybe it would be worthwhile to explore not <solving x>, but <stating X as a problem that attracts Google/IBM/etc.-scale money> as a superior strategy in some cases.
There was also folding@home, pioneering the distributed-donated-computing model, and the aforementioned gamification of the problem, and hundreds of the most intricate, custom-tailed, more-or-less insane ideas people devoted months and/or careers and/or careers of their most promising post-docs to that didn't pan out.
Like cellular automata. They don't work for this, trust me. (Great hit for interactive poster sessions, though)