A way to use artificial intelligence to predict chemical reactions

In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the group outlines their approach, which they describe as an improvement over other models. Predicting what will happen when chemicals are mixed or treated in certain ways is difficult because of all the variables involved. But scientists would like to have a tool that does it anyway, because it would dramatically speed up development of useful new materials, especially drugs. In this new effort, the team at IBM has taken an entirely new approach to creating such a tool. The new approach involves treating chemical reactions as a translation problem by rephrasing elements in such predictions as letters and words rather than atoms and molecules.