Generalization of the shot-scaling budget beyond 5PTI

Determine whether the asymptotic shot-scaling budget S(N), calibrated using the 5PTI protein, generalizes to proteins beyond 5PTI.

Background

The paper introduces S(N) as a shot-scaling metric intended to estimate the number of samples required for the QAOA pipeline to recover a viable low-energy sidechain-packing solution with a specified probability. The metric is calibrated from exhaustive-search results on the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (5PTI) and then extrapolated to larger problem sizes.

The authors explicitly leave unresolved whether this empirically fitted budget remains predictive for other proteins, whose rotamer distributions, interaction graphs, energy landscapes, and structural contexts may differ substantially from those of 5PTI.