A filter‐and‐fan approach to the 2D HP model of the protein folding problem

We examine a prominent and widely‐studied model of the protein folding problem, the two‐dimensional (2D) HP model, by means of a filter‐and‐fan (F&F) solution approach. Our method is designed to generate compound moves that explore the solution space in a dynamic and adaptive fashion. Computational results for standard sets of benchmark problems show that the F&F algorithm is highly competitive with the current leading algorithms, requiring only a single solution trial to obtain best known solutions to all problems tested, in contrast to a hundred or more trials required in the typical case to evaluate the performance of the best of the alternative methods.