We exactly considering this since this year. But there are some major problems that cannot be solved in short term.
Inorganic crystal structure database (and there is one database literally this name) is way smaller than what we have for proteins. Also by nature, Transformer is hardly useful for crystals because the crystal is repetitive. You don't throw the same sequence over and over to transformer and hope it will work like magic.
My current understanding is that Graph Neural Network is perfect for this job because graph can exactly describe this kind of repetitive nature of crystal.
GNNs and graph transformers are the current state of the art methods for this kind of crystal property prediction task. One drawback is that they don’t seem to capture long range structure all that well, and the current generative models (which are really cool) based on GNNs don’t seem to take advantage of symmetry that well
not soo similar really, but yes, alphafold-style generative models could help find realistic structures for a specific composition. However a) data is much worse (I would say so at least...), b) the clever tricks of alphafold centered around strings of aminoacid don't really apply to particles in a box... and c) search space might be even larger if you go to interestingly sized systems.
Also there's been some people arguing about the particles in a box situation for a loooong time and the most promising approach currently is diffusion.
Idea: run ads telling ios users that buying in-app is much more expensive than buying in the website. Tell users that apple is scamming them with in app purchases. If this becomes vox populi, it will be a pr nightmare for apple.
We would need some kind of consumer's association or foundation to run it in order to protect funders identities.
Also of interest is that the inventor, John Alexander, submitted a patent application (US5866902), then withdrew the application. Perhaps this was done to establish prior art in the USPTO's database, and prevent someone else from patenting it?
