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"Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely."

Are you sure about that? I am not sure that a protein structure can be checked in polynomial time, given there is no algorithm to check a protein structure besides manual labor.



You can compute the free energy but that's not cheap. Still that doesn't give you a definitive answer to folded or not folded. It tells you more folded or less folded.


Having a person manually check something is an O(1) operation.


Even for the computer it is Ω(n), because it must transmit the entire problem to the person.




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