Yeah, that’s a fair point. I am kind of coming from this place where we’ve been treating structure solution as an optimization/search problem for a long time. To me the competing methods to AlphaFold seem a lot more like computer chess systems than human grandmasters. The first structure solution by a human I guess would be closer to the grandmaster in this analogy. (Caveat: I’m in an adjacent field so not a direct expert)
I think higher level scientific tasks are like evaluating evidence under different mechanistic hypotheses, designing experiments to disambiguate these, coming up with novel mechanistic hypotheses, etc. I’m also not sure that automated systems for these tasks require intelligence. They just have to obsolete the current intelligent systems (humans) that perform these tasks, like computer chess. I don’t know, maybe this is “no true Scotsman” for machine intelligence?
I think higher level scientific tasks are like evaluating evidence under different mechanistic hypotheses, designing experiments to disambiguate these, coming up with novel mechanistic hypotheses, etc. I’m also not sure that automated systems for these tasks require intelligence. They just have to obsolete the current intelligent systems (humans) that perform these tasks, like computer chess. I don’t know, maybe this is “no true Scotsman” for machine intelligence?