Synthesis Bounty Board

A global challenge for materials discovery

Bridging the gap between computational prediction and experimental synthesis. Can we make what we predict? Can we predict what we've made?

The Vision

The Synthesis Bounty Board is a global community challenge designed to spark scientific breakthroughs in materials discovery. We bring together scientists who predict new materials and those who create them in the lab. Each challenge focuses on a curated set of target compounds selected to expose fundamental hurdles in AI-enabled materials discovery.

Our vision is to establish a truly bidirectional link between structure and synthesis: identifying practical synthesis routes for theoretically predicted materials, and predicting the complex crystal structures that emerge in real experiments.

Through prizes, an expert adjudication board, open participation, and publication of results, we aim to inspire collaboration, accelerate innovation, and create shared benchmarks and standards for discovering, validating, and synthesizing new materials.

Why It Matters

There is a growing rift in the materials discovery community. With the advent of generative AI, millions of new materials are being predicted without consideration of their synthetic accessibility. On the other hand, many experimentally-synthesized materials with new crystal structures or unconventional stoichiometries are too complex to be predicted through current AI approaches.

Several synthesis-related predictive hurdles must be addressed to unify the field and drive meaningful progress:

1. Synthetic accessibility is not yet predictable. We cannot reliably determine which predicted compounds should be experimentally feasible.