A robotic chemist

Sounds like an ideal case for AI - repetitive manual labour with clear, measurable results. Exactly what computers are good at.

It works initially with a human chemist to find promising new types of molecules. Then artificial intelligence takes over and the robot sets off to invent on its own. "It's a bit like a robotic bartender that mixes cocktails," says Glasgow's Regius Professor of Chemistry Lee Cronin. "In our lab, the robot mixes together the chemicals in just the right way - shaken, not stirred - and explores what happens."

"As with all things, the human being is the expert. What we wanted to do was capture the expertise of the human being. So every time the robot and the human worked together, and the human made a discovery and tagged it as a discovery, the robot was shadowing the human. When the robot had been trained for about 10% of all the tasks, it then was able to predict, without the human being, which experiments it should do next."

Writing in the journal Nature, Prof Cronin's team say the robot has already synthesised more than 1,000 new chemicals and reactions, including one with a distinctive 3D structure that is among the top 1% most "peculiar" molecules yet known.

"There are more molecules possible to be made than there are atoms in the Universe," he says. "There are so many molecules we need to search for and make, there's no way we could even scratch the surface without some help." It offers the prospect of research that is cheaper, safer and less wasteful, but Prof Cronin says there is little danger this "robochemist" will make its human trainers redundant.

He says: "Chemists, most of the time in the laboratory, are doing manual labour." From now on, they can look forward to spending more time doing chemistry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-44872432