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Stanford AI recreates chemistry's periodic table of elements
It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form. A new artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Stanford physicists accomplished the same feat in just a few hours.
Called Atom2Vec, the program successfully learned to distinguish between different atoms after analyzing a list of chemical compound names from an online database. The unsupervised AI then used concepts borrowed from the field of natural language processing – in particular, the idea that the properties of words can be understood by looking at other words surrounding them – to cluster the elements according to their chemical properties.
[...] Zhang and his group modeled Atom2Vec on an AI program that Google engineers created to parse natural language. Called Word2Vec, the language AI works by converting words into numerical codes, or vectors. By analyzing the vectors, the AI can estimate the probability of a word appearing in a text given the co-occurrence of other words.
[...] Zhang hopes that in the future, scientists can harness Atom2Vec's knowledge to discover and design new materials. "For this project, the AI program was unsupervised, but you could imagine giving it a goal and directing it to find, for example, a material that is highly efficient at converting sunlight to energy," Zhang said.
Wake me up when an AI discovers the Island of Stability.
Learning atoms for materials discovery (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1801181115) (DX)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 28 2018, @01:37PM
Forget genes. Look lower at biochemestry. Maybe there ARE ways of stringing together other atoms to form *EXTREMELY* complex molecules, which can be used as building blocks for other components, which are used to build other components, which eventually build molecular machines like what we refer to as "cells" in biology. And by "other atoms" I mean NOT hydrogen, oxygen, carbon that is the basis of the biochemestry we all know and love.
Some other type of "biochemistry" that could form life. But is not naturally occurring on Earth. We are somewhat biased to think that all biochemestry must be like ours, or alternately substitute silicon for carbon but otherwise be similar.
Would we recognize alien life if we saw it? At the big picture macroscopic level, probably yes. If it is anything remotely like a plant or animal. But if you see something like a "rock" is it just a rock or a life form? You might search for any kind of respiration, food intake, excretion, reproduction, or other life processes. But one test might simply be is it made of long chain hydrocarbons (that we could burn for fuel). If not, then it probably is not alive. (???)
Even ignoring life, maybe it can be discovered that entirely unknown non-bio chemical compounds can be formed from unknown ways to snapping atoms together into molecules. And possibly useful molecules. Like super strong or hard substances. Things that are impervious to trolls and dmca notices.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.