Short answers, pulled from the story.
Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction, specifically for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences.
Demis Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Hassabis had met Legg when both were postdocs at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and Suleyman had been a friend through family.
AlphaFold 2 achieved a median global distance test score of 87.0 across protein targets in the free-modelling category at CASP14 in November 2020, with an overall error of less than one Angstrom, the width of an atom. The CASP organisers declared the protein structure prediction problem essentially solved.
Hassabis entered an Amiga Power competition called “Win-a-job-at-Bullfrog” and won a place at Bullfrog Productions. At seventeen he co-designed and served as lead programmer on the 1994 simulation game Theme Park alongside designer Peter Molyneux; that game sold several million copies.
Hassabis co-authored a landmark paper published in PNAS showing for the first time that patients with hippocampal damage, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. This established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall, and was listed in Science magazine’s top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007.
AlphaGo won 4-1 against former world champion Lee Sedol in March 2016 in a $1 million challenge match held in Seoul, South Korea. The match was later the subject of a documentary film also titled AlphaGo, which won the Cannes Lion Grand Prix in 2016.