A Heuristic Program to Discover Syntheses for Complex Organic Molecules

Abstract : Organic chemical synthesis is found to be a suitable problem for developing machine intelligence. The present article aims to describe the program organization as a heuristic search, the design of the Problem Solving Tree and the search procedures in condiserable detail. Examples of syntheses discovered and the problem solving tree developed are given. The programs are written mostly in PL1(F) applicable to an IBM 360/67 and the timings (batch mode) indicate that it is a fast and efficient practical systems. (Modified author abstract)