🤖 AI Summary
This work aims to achieve computable chemical synthesis—i.e., precise, code-driven control of reaction pathways on general-purpose reconfigurable hardware to automate the synthesis of any stable, isolable molecule while satisfying mass conservation, finite reaction time, and analytical detectability constraints.
Method: We introduce the “chemputation” paradigm, modeling synthesis as graph transformations over the space Reagents × Process × Catalyst. We formally define and prove the Universal Chemical Synthesis Theorem, introduce the notion of “analytically reachable quantity” for molecules, and establish dynamic error correction as essential. Our end-to-end implementation integrates the Chemputer hardware platform, the chempiler compiler, assembly-theory–driven reachability analysis, and a real-time sensing feedback framework.
Results: Experimental validation demonstrates that chemical reactions are intrinsically programmable, observable, and correctable graph operations. We identify reactor count and sensor bandwidth as critical scalability bottlenecks for chemputation.
📝 Abstract
Chemputation, the execution of code controlled reaction pathways on universally reconfigurable hardware, offers a route to treating chemical synthesis as a formally computable i.e. chemputable process to produce chemical compounds or molecules. Here I present a proof that a chemputer endowed with a finite, but extensible reagent, catalyst, process condition sets, and a chempiler that maps reaction graphs to hardware graphs, and dynamic error correction handles, is universal for the synthesis of any stable, isolable molecule that respects conservation of matter and finite reaction time and can be produced in detectable amounts. In developing this proof, I also expanded the internationally accepted definition of a molecule, by requiring that the molecule must be reachable in an analytically accessible amount using concepts from assembly theory. This shows that error correction is a vital requirement for chemputation, and I formalise the universal chemical synthesis theorem, demonstrate a full worked example, and explore the practical limits imposed by vessel count and sensing bandwidth. In doing so, I show that chemical reactions are not implicit blackbox functions but emergent graph operations or chemical transformations over Reagents (R) x Process (P) x Catalyst (K). The role of universally configurable hardware is also highlighted, with the introduction of a chempiling function that translates synthesis pathways into executable hardware configurations.