Machine Learning Program Helps Synthesize New Materials

A new artificial intelligence system is able to recognize higher-level patterns that are consistent across different recipes for producing particular types of materials. A team of materials scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the new system that can identify correlations between precursor chemicals used in materials recipes and the crystal structures of the resulting products. The system uses statistical methods that provide a natural mechanism for generating original recipes, which suggest alternative recipes for known materials that accord well with real recipes. The new system learns to perform computational tasks by analyzing large sets of training data. Traditionally, attempts to use neural networks to generate materials recipes have had problems with sparsity and scarcity.