From: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/game-has-changed-ai-...

“The organizers even worried DeepMind may have been cheating somehow. So Lupas set a special challenge: a membrane protein from a species of archaea, an ancient group of microbes. For 10 years, his research team tried every trick in the book to get an x-ray crystal structure of the protein. ‘We couldn’t solve it.’”

“But AlphaFold had no trouble. It returned a detailed image of a three-part protein with two long helical arms in the middle. The model enabled Lupas and his colleagues to make sense of their x-ray data; within half an hour, they had fit their experimental results to AlphaFold’s predicted structure. ‘It is almost perfect,’ Lupas says.”

exactly. Even an incomplete map with somewhat limited resolution makes navigation a hell of a lot easier than flying blind. This effectively is a data reduction solution-- if you have a fuzzy shape of the thing you are trying to model, and you learn the mechanics better with each thing you model, your ability to quickly and accurately reach a goal improves

That's true and also is not what is being challenged by my comment.