Human versus Robots in the Discovery and Crystallization of Gigantic Polyoxometalates

Abstract

The discovery of new gigantic molecules formed by self‐assembly and crystal growth is challenging as it combines two contingent events; first is the formation of a new molecule, and second its crystallization. Herein, we construct a workflow that can be followed manually or by a robot to probe the envelope of both events and employ it for a new polyoxometalate cluster, Na 6 [Mo 120 Ce 6 O 366 H 12 (H 2 O) 78 ]⋅200 H 2 O ( 1 ) which has a trigonal‐ring type architecture (yield 4.3 % based on Mo). Its synthesis and crystallization was probed using an active machine‐learning algorithm developed by us to explore the crystallization space, the algorithm results were compared with those obtained by human experimenters. The algorithm‐based search is able to cover ca. 9 times more crystallization space than a random search and ca. 6 times more than humans and increases the crystallization prediction accuracy to 82.4±0.7 % over 77.1±0.9 % from human experimenters.