Go and make some drugs

Go, which originated in China 2500 years ago, challenges its players to surround their opponents playing pieces with their own. Despite relatively simple rules and minimalist gameplay, with black and white round stones placed on a rectilinear grid, its strategy is even more complex than chess, and for many years it was considered a game in which computers could never beat a human master. However, since the artificial intelligence company Google DeepMind developed the program AlphaGo in 2015, even the greatest Go champions have had to surrender their crown to the silicon rival.

AlphaGo is a neural network that uses mathematical rules to learn how to play games. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Munster in Germany has used the same rules to plan chemical syntheses – the recipes that build up complex molecules such as drugs from simple building blocks. Again thought for many years to be too complex for computers to master, this planning technique, known as retrosynthesis, could save the pharmaceutical industry a great deal of money and time