A three-dimensional off-lattice protein model with two species of monomers, hydrophobic and hydrophilic, is studied. Enlightened by the law of reciprocity among things in the physical world, a heuristic quasi-physical algorithm for the protein structure prediction problem is put forward. First, by elaborately simulating the movement of the smooth elastic balls in the physical world, the algorithm finds low energy configurations for a given monomer chain. An “off-trap” strategy is then proposed to get out of local minima. Experimental results ...
