AI-invented syntheses are a hit in their lab debut
By 
Katrina Krämer2018-03-02T12:23:00
First proof that routes devised by an algorithm work in practice could make organic chemistry accessible to non-experts
‘This is the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that a computer program predicts a synthesis, you go to the lab and – boom! – it works.’ Bartosz Grzybowski from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea and the Polish Academy of Sciences is talking about his retrosynthetic tool Chematica. The software, which has been laboriously programmed with 50,000 chemical rules and can evaluate thousands of possible routes, has proven that it can design practical syntheses for eight compounds previously thought tough to make.