'Robo-Chemist', controlled by machine learning to explore chemical reactivity, discovers new reactions, molecules, and reactivity
In a paper just published in Nature, a new approach to exploring chemical space following reactivity is presented. By building a robot that is able to screen chemical reactions by combining the reagents together in a reactor and then screening them for reactivity using a combination of NMR, IR, and Mass Spec. The system needs to be trained by the expert chemist, but after that it is able to automatically assign reactivity using machine learning. From the reactivity searching, a range of new reactions and molecules were discovered.
Link to paper