Tennis

Most folks follow tennis, at least at the Majors (and possibly, the Olympics), and are aware of the, now past, kerfuffle when computerized, e.g. Hawkeye, line judging put all those folks out of a job. Now, it seems, something similar is happening in medchem. It's a fascinating read, even if you don't get all the jargon.

As mentioned more than once, I started undergraduate as a chem major, but that didn't last long thanks to a 1940's vintage PChem lab. But since then, I've always wondered about the process of determining the structure of molecules. Clearly, it was possible decades ago before X-ray methods were available, since we still know what water looks like at the atomic level.

At one point in time I happened on a piece written, I assume, by a coding guru which boiled down to: 'software has eaten the world'. Which asserted that writing code was the key to Tomorrow. Well, not so much. Even in its current lame version, AI is possible not because of new Nobel level software algorithms, but because the EE folks have managed to generate logic and memory at densities never contemplated. So, sorry coders, but your lame century and a half old correlation programs now can converge on something resembling "truth" thanks to prodigious amounts of CPU, GPU, and memory. Now, if only AI could just intuit like Einstein...