How Quantum Data Can Teach AI to Do Better Chemistry

How Quantum Data Can Teach AI to Do Better Chemistry

Sometimes a visually compelling metaphor is all you need to get an otherwise complicated idea across. In the summer of 2001, a Tulane physics professor named John P. Perdew came up with a banger. He wanted to convey the hierarchy of computational complexity inherent in the behavior of electrons in materials. He called it “Jacob’s Ladder.” He was appropriating an idea from the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob dreamed of a ladder “set up on the ear…