Ab Initio Reactive Computer Aided Molecular Design

Few would dispute that theoretical chemistry tools can now provide keen insights into chemical phenomena. Yet the holy grail of efficient and reliable prediction of complex reactivity has remained elusive. Fortunately, recent advances in electronic structure theory based on the concepts of both element- and rank-sparsity, coupled with the emergence of new highly parallel computer architectures, have led to a significant increase in the time and length scales which can be simulated using first principles molecular dynamics. This opens the possibility of new discovery-based approaches to chemical reactivity, such as the recently proposed ab initio nanoreactor. We argue that due to these and other recent advances, the holy grail of computational discovery for complex chemical reactivity is rapidly coming within our reach.