My impression as a non-expert from reading the last thread is:<p>DeepMind didn't "solve" protein folding in the game theory sense that perfect play is now possible and there are no better solutions to be had. That's probably what most of us expect from "X has been solved."<p>But it "solved" it in the sense that it answered a core unanswered question of an entire field. Algorithmic protein folding was a research field trying to answer whether it was even possible to climb from 40 to 90 on the CASP competition, or whether physical experiments were inherently superior. Obviously entering that field implied that you thought it was possible, but it wasn't known. DeepMind has now answered that question: yes, computational folding can work as well as experiments. That's a solution, if you take the open problem to be "can this be done at all?" rather than "what is the perfect way to do it?"