Search Strategies for the Task of Organic Chemical Synthesis

The design of application of artificia l intelli­gence to a scientific task such as Organic Chemical Synthesis was the topic of a Doctoral Thesis completed in the summer of 197I. Chemical synthesis in practice involves i) the choice of molecule to be synthesized; i i) the formulation and specification of a plan for synthesis (involving a valid reaction pathway leading from commercial or readily available compounds to the target compounds with consideration of feasibility regarding the purposes of synthesis);iii ) the selection of specific individual steps of reaction and their temporal ordering for execution; iv) the exper­imental execution of the synthesis and v) the redesign of syntheses, if necessary, depending upon the exper­imental results. In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.