Autonomous artificial intelligence discovers mechanisms of molecular self-organization in virtual experiments

Molecular self-organization driven by concerted many-body interactions produces the ordered structures that define both inanimate and living matter. Understanding the physical mechanisms that govern the formation of molecular complexes and crystals is key to controlling the assembly of nanomachines and new materials. We present an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that uses deep reinforcement learning and transition path theory to discover the mechanism of molecular self-organization phenomena from computer simulations. The agent adaptively learns how to sample complex molecular events and, on the fly, constructs quantitative mechanistic models. By using the mechanistic understanding for AI-driven sampling, the agent closes the learning cycle and overcomes time-scale gaps of many orders of magnitude. Symbolic regression condenses the mechanism into a human-interpretable form. Applied to ion association in solution, gas-hydrate crystal formation, and membrane-protein assembly, the AI agent identifies the many-body solvent motions governing the assembly process, discovers the variables of classical nucleation theory, and reveals competing assembly pathways. The mechanistic descriptions produced by the agent are predictive and transferable to close thermodynamic states and similar systems. Autonomous AI sampling has the power to discover assembly and reaction mechanisms from materials science to biology.