Chemical Synthesis With Artificial Intelligence

In 1996, when a computer won a match against the then reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov, it was nothing short of a sensation. After this breakthrough in the world of chess, the board game Go was long considered to be a bastion reserved for human players due to its complexity. Nowadays, however, the world's best players no longer have any chance of winning against the "AlphaGo" software. The recipe for the success of this computer programme is made possible through a combination of the so-called Monte Carlo Tree Search and deep neural networks based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. A team of researchers from the University of Muenster in Germany has now demonstrated that this combination is extremely well suited to planning chemical syntheses--so-called retrosyntheses--with unprecedented efficiency.