[kxs]

The targets are completely unknown. They were experimentally solved, but not submitted to the Protein Data Bank. You basically get a target every day (meaning sequence of amino acids) and then depending on the category, you have three days to predict it (I think upto two weeks for "human" servers). In the modeling category they participated in, you can submit 5 models. A model is a fully predicted 3d structure of the protein. The targets are mostly independent. Some targets were split over a few days. But in principle, a target on day X has no connection to a target on day Y. The targets have varying difficulty. There are two categories: TBM (templated based) and FM (free modeling). You don't know which protein corresponds to which category, you can just guess by looking at the available template data. They focused on FM targets. Meaning there are no homologous available. It's hard to say how good of an indicator the results are. Looking at the contact prediction results, many methods are getting very good at constructing MSAs (gathering similar sequences). We already saw this at CASP12 - I think the FM targets are getting "easier" in that sense. There is basically zero feedback throughout the whole competition. Some targets are released after the deadline (because of publications), but in general, you don't know anything until the CASP meeting, which currently takes place. The competition ended in August.