Robot chemist could revolutionise study of new molecules through machine learning

Scientists have created a robot chemist that could revolutionise the way new molecules are discovered, using machine learning techniques. Chemists from the University of Glasgow have trained an artificially-intelligent organic chemical synthesis robot to automatically explore a very large number of chemical reactions. The system, underpinned by machine-learning algorithms, can uncover new reactions and molecules. It is hoped the results could lead to lower costs for discovering new molecules for drugs, new chemical products including materials, polymers and molecules for high tech applications like imaging. The team demonstrated the system's potential by searching around 1,000 reactions using combinations of 18 different starting chemicals.