Reactions and Reaction Generators, Further Discussion

We emphasize that the exclusion of other feasible reaction generators should not be construed as a limitation of the system — others could be included easily. In fact, our current thinking is that the chemistry of the system should drive the reaction generators, and not vice versa. In this approach, reactions are obtained from mechanistic steps, which allows the automatic generation of any reaction scheme. Work on implementing this approach is in progress (see Section 10). 

When bonds are counted as electron pairs, the same number of electrons is found on both sides of a reaction equation. In order to ensure that both forward and retro- 

RG22 As already pointed out and illustrated with Fig. 7-9 this scheme is of great importance in organic chemistry. 

RG33 This is also a very important scheme, comprising many organic reactions. 

RG12 Valence electrons are transformed from a free electron pair into bonding electrons and a change in the valence state of atom X occurs. Before this scheme is applied in EROS, a table of valence states for each atom is scanned to determine whether this change in the valence for atom X is allowed. The scheme has importance in representing oxidations at atom X as exemplified with the change S - S (Fig. 13). 

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