AlphaGo’s Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "revolutionary"
work on proteins, the building blocks of life, using the AlphaFold2 tool. Professor John Jumper, who worked with Hassabis on the breakthrough, shared the award along with US-based Professor David Baker.
Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became Google DeepMind and created AlphaGo, which caused a global sensation. The scientists used AI to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2. Proteins are made of chains of building blocks called amino acids that each fold in a unique shape. Scientists had long struggled to predict the shape of each of the millions of proteins, but that structure drives what it does in the human body. Understanding the structure is crucial to knowing how to target the protein and alter its behaviour, which is crucial in medicine.
The Nobel committee called AlphaFold2 a "complete revolution", and the tool is now used for 200 million proteins worldwide.
“I’ve dedicated my whole life to working on AI because I believe in its potential to change the world," Hassabis said in a press conference on Wednesday. He encouraged children to not only play computer games, but also make them, saying that his early gaming was the gateway to his experimentation with AI.
The Nobel committee did not have his phone number and had to called Hassabis’ wife, but she ignored the call several times before realizing it was a Swedish number and might be important.
Adapted from a report by the BBC.