A large-scale benchmark of DEE compared with alternative methods of protein structure prediction and design finds that DEE reliably converges to the optimal solution for protein lengths for which it runs in a reasonable amount of time. It significantly outperforms the alternatives under consideration, which involved techniques derived from mean field theory, genetic algorithms, and the Monte Carlo method. However, the other algorithms are appreciably faster than DEE and thus can be applied to larger and more complex problems; their relative accuracy can be extrapolated from a comparison to the DEE solution within the scope of problems accessible to DEE.
