A correlation between crystallographic computing and artificial intelligence research

Artificial intelligence research, as a part of computer science, has produced a variety of programs of experimental and applications interest: programs for scientific inference, chemical synthesis, planning robot control, extraction of meaning from English sentences, speech understanding, interpretation of visual images, and so on. The symbolic manipulation techniques used in artificial intelligence provide a framework for analyzing and coding the knowledge base of a problem independently of an algorithmic implementation. A possible application of artificial intelligence methodology to protein crystallography is described.