So the fact that the program – or any such program – does as well as it does here means, folks, that the handwriting is on the wall. Not this afternoon, and not next week, but in the easily foreseeable future retrosynthesis and synthetic organic chemistry planning are going to be taken out of the hands of chemists. At least, that’s how it’s going to seem to us, the chemists of the present. But to future chemists, the ones who will enter the science once this transformation is complete, it won’t seem like that at all. To them, synthesis planning will always have been something that you have machine help with – why would you do it any other way? Who can carry a zillion reaction examples around in their head?
Behold the rise of the machines. It’s been going on for a while, but there are landmarks along the way, and we may have just passed another one with the publication of this paper. It’s open-access, from an interestingly mixed team: the Polish Academy of Science, Northwestern University, the University of Warsaw, the
— Read on blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/03/06/retrosynthesis-here-it-comes