Wow. Interesting thread.

The more I learn about the science that Howard and Dr. Hogue (and others) are involved in, the more interesting and exciting it becomes to watch the project progress.

My understanding of the science is...lacking and I am not a math, biology or computer science genius, so I can't follow all the diverse aspects of what is going on. However, I think I grasp the general concepts.

Some questions I have that were prompted by this thread:

The things being tested by the project are varied and potentially changing as the project continues. We have already tested and refined a distributed computing client. We have created a large amount of data using the sampling methods which have had the scoring methods applied to them. As a result of the current data analyzation that you are undertaking you will, hopefully, be able to refine and improve the algorithms used for both the sampling of proteins and for the scoring of these proteins. As your labs and other science projects progress, you may discover new methods of either sampling or scoring and test these out, or test various combinations of methods. As scientists elsewhere publish new sampling and scoring information, you could potentially (depending upon permissions, legal wrangling, IP law, etc.) incorporate and test methodologies and algorithms that probably didn't exist when the DF project was initially conceived.

Precisely because of the huge number of iterations produced by the Distributed Folding project, it seems to be a wonderful platform for testing and verifying new algorithms for and approaches to protein folding, both in terms of creating samples and in scoring the results of those samples. In a sense, you could put a new 'concept' into the program and in only weeks get what might take years to model in a lab (if you can get the computer time and if your 'concept' isn't outdated by time you finish).

Am I way off base here? (it is late and I am REALLY tired, so I might make no sense at all)