Of course, 99.9% of science is engineering, not "science". We do science all the time without asking questions or attempting to come up with generalized answers.
Is a scientist doing a linear regression not doing science?
Anyway, alphafold, while not particularly "scientific", did answer one scientific question: it is possible to predict the structure of most proteins thru a combination of limited structural and extensive sequence information, combined with a sophisticated (and "non-scientific") algorithm. That was an open question for some time and their results convinced the community that their methods were right. What's amazing is that while it's entirely nonscientific, the results have been absolutely blockbuster in the scientific field. And even better, the only reason Alphafold was able to show this is because there was a well-defined protein structure leaderboard.
Is a scientist doing a linear regression not doing science?
Anyway, alphafold, while not particularly "scientific", did answer one scientific question: it is possible to predict the structure of most proteins thru a combination of limited structural and extensive sequence information, combined with a sophisticated (and "non-scientific") algorithm. That was an open question for some time and their results convinced the community that their methods were right. What's amazing is that while it's entirely nonscientific, the results have been absolutely blockbuster in the scientific field. And even better, the only reason Alphafold was able to show this is because there was a well-defined protein structure leaderboard.