For fucks sake man, all the physics problems we end up doing start from a relatively simple description of a system, which turns into a huge mess and pages of writing trying to solve it, and you end up with another relatively simple description.

I just don't understand how someone could even get through an undergraduate degree in physics without seeing this complexity in E&M. You got 4 rules that describe everything. Each rule can be written on a short line and only contain a handful of symbols. In other words: those rules are simple. Yet that doesn't mean they're very useful in that form, but you can derive the rest from them. That is exactly what I'm talking about with the game of life.

How the fuck did you get through differential equations without seeing how complexity arises from simplicity, let alone Jackson or Goldstein!?

Idk man, either you're lying or being disingenuous. You're the only one who said biology is simple. No one even implied that! If you're not lying about your degree you're willfully misinterpreting the comments. Why? For what purpose?

I had to break it to you, but you cannot predict protein folding directly from first principles. Nor can any deep-learning model.

You can use molecular dynamics. Maybe, if you are lucky and have the computational resources to do so.

You might want to relate molecular dynamics to "simple rules", but you would be delusional. Molecular dynamics typically use classical forcefields parameterized on data and some quantum simulations. It is not based on first principles.

Proteins fold in patterns generated over millennium of natural selection. It is not simple.