IBM's AI learns how to predict the outcomes of chemical reactions

By thinking of atoms as letters and molecules as words an Artificial Intelligence (AI) from IBM is now using the same neural network techniques that other AI's use to translate between different languages to predict the outcomes of organic chemical reactions, and the breakthrough could help speed up the development of new drugs. Scientists have been trying to teach computers about chemistry for decades in the hope that one day they'll be able to help them discover and predict the outcomes of chemical reactions but organic chemicals can be extraordinarily complex, and past simulations of their behaviours have been at best time consuming and inaccurate. Now though the team at IBM, and their new AI have tried a different technique to solve this thorny problem. "Instead of translating English into German or Chinese, we had the same artificial intelligence technology look at hundreds of thousands or millions of chemical reactions and got it learn the basic structure of the'language' of organic chemistry, and then we had it try to predict the outcomes of possible organic chemical reactions," said the study's co-author Teodoro Laino from IBM Research's lab in Zurich. "We want to help chemists design new synthesis routes for organic compounds," he added.