[twanvl]

An important input to this (and similar) algorithms is multiple sequence alignment, which tells the algorithm which parts of proteins are preserved between species and variants, and which amino-acids mutate together. So already it is relying on natural selection to do some of the work. And the algorithm will probably not work very well if you input a random sequence not found in nature and ask it to find the folding.

[haihaibye]

I hope not, as knowing how a novel mutation in a patient alters a protein would be extremely useful when trying to find disease causing variants.