Black and White AI programmer wins Nobel prize: "an incredible honor...it's really the big one"

Professor Demis Hassabis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Professor John Jumper, Professor David Baker, and Professor David Baker. Professor Demis hassabis is a cofounder of DeepMind and began his programming career at Bullfrog and Lionhead. Hassabis and Jumper received their share of the award for their "complete" revolution in predicting protein structures using the AI tool AlphaFold2.

AlphaFold was first made available to researchers in 2018. AlphaFold2 for 2020 is the second version (AlphaFold3 was announced in May of this year). DeepMind created an AI that predicts protein structures. It has been used by David Baker and other researchers to predict the structure for almost all known proteins.

According to the Nobel citation Professor Baker will receive half of the Nobel prize "for computational protein designing", while the remaining half will be shared by Professor Hassabis of DeepMind and Professor Jumper from DeepMind, "for protein structure predictions". The winners will receive a total of 11m Swedish Kronor ($1.05m).

Heiner Linke is the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. He says that one of the discoveries this year is the construction of spectacular protein. The other involves fulfilling a dream that has been around for 50 years: predicting the structure of proteins from their amino acids sequences. Both of these discoveries have vast possibilities."

The Nobel press release states that AlphaFold2 was used "to predict virtually all 200 million proteins identified by researchers."

The organization continues, "Since the breakthrough, AlphaFold2 is used by over two million people in 190 countries." Researchers can now use AlphaFold2 to better understand antibiotic resistance, and create images of enzymes capable of decomposing plastic.

"Life would not exist without protein." "The greatest benefit to humanity is that we can now predict the structure of proteins and design our own protein."

This work has a wide range of potential and actual medical benefits. Proteins are often described as "building blocks" for all body cells. AlphaFold 2 is credited with creating plastic-guzzling proteins and battling antibiotic resistance.

Hassbis, in a telephone call shortly after, laughed, "It's a great honour, you know. It's incredibly big." "My mind went blank, it was an incredible experience. I had a normal day of work in front of me, but that's going to have to change.

Hassabis has credited his early days with inspiring children to be interested not only in games, but also in the way they are created. This is what ultimately led him to his AI passion.

Hassabis stated in 2020 that "I think it started sparking ideas in my mind about how the chess machine plays chess and learning more about that." "Many kids start out playing games like I did and then get into programming, and then use this incredible tool, a computer, to create something."

Hassabis began his career at Bullfrog, before attending university. After graduation, he joined Lionhead as the lead AI programmer for Black & White. Due to the long development time, the game was released in 2001. By then, Hassabis left to start Elixir Studios where he served as executive director for Republic: The Revolution, and Evil Genius.

He then moved more towards academia and completed a PhD, working at several universities before co-founding DeepMind in 2010. The goal was to create an AI that could be used for any purpose, but the company started with videogames of the '70s & '80s. DeepMind trained its AI on games such as Breakout and Pong in the early days, learning the rules to master the game. Later, the company focused on more complex games, like Go and Starcraft 2.

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014. Around 2016, after all the videogame training, the company turned its focus to protein folding. AlphaFold is a software that, almost from the beginning, has made "stunning advances" in protein fold.