A.I. recreates periodic table of elements from scratch - Futurity

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form. "Instead of feeding in all of the words and sentences from a collection of texts, we fed Atom2Vec all the known chemical compounds…" Called Atom2Vec, the program successfully learned to distinguish between different atoms after analyzing a list of chemical compound names from an online database. The unsupervised AI then used concepts borrowed from the field of natural language processing--in particular, the idea that the properties of words can be understood by looking at other words surrounding them--to cluster the elements according to their chemical properties. "We wanted to know whether an AI can be smart enough to discover the periodic table on its own, and our team showed that it can," says study leader Shoucheng Zhang, a professor of physics at Stanford University.