Exploration of Chemical Space through Automated Reasoning

The vast size of composition space poses a significant challenge for materials chemistry: exhaustive enumeration of potentially interesting compositions is typically infeasible, hindering assessment of important criteria ranging from novelty and stability to cost and performance. We report a tool, Comgen, for the efficient exploration of composition space, which makes use of logical methods from computer science used for proving theorems. We demonstrate how these techniques, which have not previously been applied to materials discovery, can enable reasoning about scientific domain knowledge provided by human experts. Comgen accepts a variety of user-specified criteria, converts these into an abstract form, and utilises a powerful automated reasoning algorithm to identify compositions that satisfy these user requirements, or prove that the requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. In contrast to machine learning techniques, explicitly reasoning about domain knowledge, rather than making inferences from data, ensures that Comgen’s outputs are fully interpretable and provably correct. Users interact with Comgen through a high-level Python interface. We illustrate use of the tool with several case studies focused on the search for new ionic conductors. Further, we demonstrate the integration of Comgen into an end-to-end automated workflow to propose and evaluate candidate compositions quantitatively, prior to experimental investigation. This highlights the potential of automated formal reasoning in materials chemistry.