How Quantum Data Can Teach AI to Do Better Chemistry

Sometimes a visually compelling metaphor is all you need to get an otherwise complicated idea across. In the summer of 2001, a Tulane physics professor named John P. Perdew came up with a banger. He wanted to convey the hierarchy of computational complexity inherent in the behavior of electrons in materials. He called it “ Jacob’s Ladder.” He was appropriating an idea from the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob dreamed of a ladder “set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven.