I think putting AlphaFold here was premature; it might not age well. AlphaFold is an impressive achievement but it simply has not "cracked the code for protein folding" - about 1/3rd of its predictions are too uncertain to be usable, it says nothing about dynamics, suffers from the same ML problems of failing on uncommon structures, and I was surprised to learn that many of its predictions are incorrect because it ignores topological constraints[1]. To be clear, these are
constructive criticisms of AlphaFold in isolation, my grumpiness is directed at the Nobel committee. "Cracked the code for protein folding" is simply not true; it is an ML approach with high accuracy that suffers the same ML limitations of failing to generalize or failing to understand deeper principles like R^3 topology that cannot be gleaned stochastically.
More significantly: it has yet to be especially impactful in biochemistry research, nor has its results really been carefully audited. Maybe it will turn out to deserve the prize. But the committee needed to wait. I am concerned that they got spun by Google's PR campaign - or, considering yesterday's prize, Big Tech PR in general.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10672856/