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DeepMind and others are trying. "Hassabis said the company is now planning to apply an algorithm based on AlphaGo Zero to other domains with real-world applications, starting with protein folding."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/deepmind-...

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That doesn't make any sense unless I'm missing something, A0 is suited for a completely different problem than protein folding...

The AlphaZero algorithm (monte carlo tree search with value estimator trained by reinforcement learning) works on any environment you can simulate during play time, single player or not.

Any environment with finite action and state-spaces.

No, the key requirement which makes it difficult to use on real-world tasks is that you must be able to do a forward rollout of your environment in your decision-making process.

FWIW, AlphaGo like algorithms have already been applied to this domain, see AlphaChem

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