In a first step toward generating an artificial
intelligence program that can find new laws
of nature, a Stanford team created a program
that reproduced a complex human discovery
– the periodic table.
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.
