After decades of rather unsuccessful attempts, computers are finally making impact on the practice of synthetic chemistry. This change is made possible by the combination of increased computing power and, above all, new algorithms to encode and manipulate synthetic knowledge at various levels, from sequences of full reactions to sequences of mechanistic steps. In my talk, I will illustrate how these advances have enabled completely autonomous planning of multistep syntheses of complex (natural product) targets, how they allow us to elucidate complex reaction mechanisms and, above all, discover new classes of reactions.
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