Lilith: From childhood to adolescence

Computer assisted organic synthesis is the best to date effort for the understanding and the optimization of the synthesis planning activity which represents one of the most exciting and funny tasks for a chemist. Several approaches have been developed in past years,1 each one contributing ideas and theoretical achievements which resulted in several beautiful works. Our contribution to the field, named Lilith, is still one of the youngest, but nevertheless it has come time for her to grow a little more, leaving childhood for adolescence. In her young age Lilith acquired some important attributes which qualified her behavior (a strategy, a reactivity analysis, a first level of evaluation capability); now she is going to complete her power improving her possibility of controlling operations and results. In this perspective a completely new and powerful nucleus of the program is being studied; it mainly consists of a true expert system whose tasks are (1) the control of the work flow, (2) the analysis and the evaluation of intermediate and final results, and (3) the optimization of the application of the IAIA (initial approximation increasing accuracy) principle.2 Here its first version is reported with particular attention to the analysis of the up-to-data achievements in the field of the characterization of its theoretical skeleton.