At the heart of handling chemical information within computers are methods to store complex structures accurately, uniquely and in a searchable manner. This early paper from Morgan describes one of the techniques that allowed the registration of compounds to CAS. Computers clearly deal with numbers quickly, so the further encoding of a structure into a bit number allows very fast comparison. The algorithm described within became the basis of the very widely used Morgan fingerprints and now is at the heart developments in convolutional neural networks.
The Generation of a Unique Machine Description for Chemical Structures-A Technique Developed at Chemical Abstracts Service. H. L. Morgan
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