Hierarchial Planning in Automatic Synthetic Chemistry

Under developement at RISC-LINZ is an automated synthetic planning system in the form of a multilevel heuristical (introducing a great flexibility in design) expert system (written in LISP) entailing a wide range of techniques from chemistry, mathematics and artificial intelligence. In the first stages of the prototype, where a generalized version of the Wipke algorithm was implemented, it has been recognized that success is highly dependent on the models used. Within a given level, the most accurate model (that uses the minimal amount of chemical information, thus enhancing speed) will be optimized (AI learning and statistics) with respect to concepts in organic chemistry (as given by a higher level) and reaction and molecular data-bases.