AlphaFold, DeepMind's artificial intelligence that predicts the structure of proteins, is a gift to biologists. To understand life, we need to understand proteins. Living things are molecular machines, and most of the key components are made of proteins. You are reading this article, for instance, with proteins in your retina that can detect light, various proteins that make your muscles move and so on. In one way, proteins are simple.

DeepMind has already notched up a streak of wins, showcasing AIs that have learned to play a variety of complex games with superhuman skill, from Go and StarCraft to Atari's entire back catalogue. But Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's public face and co-founder, has always stressed that these successes were just stepping stones towards a larger goal: AI that actually helps us understand the world. Today DeepMind and the organizers of the long-running Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition announced an AI that should have the huge impact that Hassabis has been after. The latest version of DeepMind's AlphaFold, a deep-learning system that can accurately predict the structure of proteins to within the width of an atom, has cracked one of biology's grand challenges. "It's the first use of AI to solve a serious problem," says John Moult at the University of Maryland, who leads the team that runs CASP.