The 2000 Olympic Games of protein structure prediction; fully automated programs are being evaluated vis-a-vis human teams in the protein structure prediction experiment CAFASP2

In this commentary, we describe two new protein structure prediction experi ments being run in parallel with the GASP experiment, which together may be regarded as the 2000 Olympic Games of structure prediction. The first new experiment is CAFASP, the Critical Assessment of Fully Automated Structure Prediction. In CAFASP, the participants are fully automated programs or Int ernet servers, and here the automated results of the programs are evaluated , without any human intervention. The second new experiment, named LiveBenc h, follows the CAFASP ideology in that it is aimed towards the evaluation o f automatic servers only, while it runs on a large set of prediction target s and in a continuous fashion. Researchers will be watching the 2000 protei n structure prediction Olympic Games, to be held in December, in order to l earn about the advances in the classical 'human-plus-machine' GASP category , the fully automated CAFASP category, and the comparison between the two.