Synthesis games for chemists to puzzle over

Synthesizing a Wordle for chemists The first time Ryan Shenvi played Wordle , when the popular word-guessing game was just taking off, he remembers thinking, “Oh, we should do this for retrosynthesis.” The La Jolla–based Scripps Research synthetic chemist spent a while thinking about how to offer multiple choices to solve a chemical synthesis puzzle; he wrote several exams in this style and toyed with a portmanteau between “Wordle” and the name of E. J. Corey , a cofounder of the field of retrosynthesis. But the idea didn’t really take off until Jonah Luo reached out to the Shenvi laboratory. Luo, then a rising sophomore in high school, had enjoyed Advanced Placement Chemistry and wanted to learn some practical skills at the bench. When Luo went looking for local researchers, Shenvi’s focus on synthetic chemistry inspired him. There was just one problem: Luo was too young to work legally at