This is incredible work, honestly. Is the theory here that humans seem to enjoy an intuitive understanding of protein folding? I seem to remember an online game (maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit) that exploited this intuition by crowdsourcing human suggestions for brute-force style protein folding work.
And am I right that the goal is to create a best-effort short-cut to the final stage of brute-force final folding to get a real result?
It's just about making simplifications where possible. You don't need a molecular dynamics simulation to predict where a pool ball will go. That simplification is easy to see and understand. Scientists and engineers have been making useful simplifications for a long time.
There are other simplifications where a bunch of forces and masses can be cancelled out, or aggregated - but we can't see them. Can a computer see them with enough processing? It seems like it.
And am I right that the goal is to create a best-effort short-cut to the final stage of brute-force final folding to get a real result?