Computational planning of the synthesis of complex natural products

Training algorithms to computationally plan multistep organic syntheses has been a challenge for more than 50 years1–7. However, the field has progressed greatly since the development of early programs such as LHASA1,7, for which reaction choices at each step were made by human operators. Multiple software platforms6,8–14 are now capable of completely autonomous planning. But these programs ‘think’ only one step at a time and have so far been...